


Just A Moment's Peace

by howlsmovinglibrary



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Belligerent Sexual Tension, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Fluff, Modern Thedas, Surana has no magic but then also writes about mage rights, Zevran is a distinguished bi and Surana is a gremlin, honestly i don't even know, plus size warden, so that's the level of consistency here, the inherent eroticism of libraries
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-16 19:07:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29337273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/howlsmovinglibrary/pseuds/howlsmovinglibrary
Summary: There was a problem with Nyd Surana’s favourite spot in the library.Someone new had moved in four rows down.Someoneinsufferable.----A modern university library AU that’s basically just a mix of my quarantine-induced yearning to work in an actual library + all my most indulgent tropes. Maybe someone, somewhere out there, will enjoy.
Relationships: Leliana/Josephine Montilyet, Zevran Arainai/Female Surana, Zevran Arainai/Female Warden
Comments: 14
Kudos: 25





	1. Chapter One

There was a problem with Nyd Surana’s favourite spot in the library.

Her favourite seat was on the Sociology floor, two floors down from History. Which meant she always had to lug herself up and down a superfluous amount of stairs with her arms full of thick, heavy books to get there... but it was worth it. 

The Sociology floor had the most light of any floor in the building. Three of the room’s four walls were entirely glass, from floor to ceiling. And Redcliffe University’s main library was a horrible looming monstrosity of a skyscraper, with Sociology as floor six, so the view out of the windows was a stunning wider panorama of the university campus (sans the ugly library building that otherwise marred the landscape) and the wide expanse of Lake Calenhad, disappearing into a silvery shimmer in the distance. Sociology was a mezzanine balcony looking down into the Law library, giving a bird's eye view of rows and rows of desks. Good for people watching... without actually having to be around people. Well, no more than two, because that’s how many seats were on each row of desks small balcony adjacent desks. And Nydhalan always chose a spot on an end, with the best view, and an annoyingly squeaky chair next to her that no one liked to sit on.

It was also close to the only vending machine that was stocked with more junk than it was healthy snacks. She’d come to rely on its stalwart allyship, and constant supplies of energy drink and chocolate, during an essay crisis. It was all part of the Maker’s divine plan.

But this week - the first week of her second term of her final year - her favourite seat had a problem.

Someone new had moved in four rows down.

Someone _insufferable_.

While Nydhalan arrived to study in the library like any sane, normal person would - in a hoodie on its third day of wear, so old it was starting to get holes around the armpits, with hair desperately scraped back and a solid litre of coffee in her thermos flask - the newcomer seemingly hadn’t got the memo on library gremlin etiquette. He had arrived every day of this first week of term impeccably dressed, in a crisp, creaseless shirt and well-fitting trousers. Curse him to the Void, he even looked well rested. 

He was also just _disgustingly pretty_. A dark, ochre-tinted tan and the silver, bleached quality to his long ash blonde hair spoke of a long time spent in the sun which - given that it was the dreary, depressing end of Wintermarch in _fucking Ferelden_ \- was frankly just uncalled for. The first day, he’d had that hair tied back in a stupid fucking man bun, and Nyd had considered calling the police. No one should look that good in the library: there was an unspoken oath that everyone here had to be overworked and miserable and fucking _look like it_ , as far as she was concerned.

But all of that was fine, she supposed. She could let his ability to look flawless before 10am on a weekday slide, she supposed.

 _If he ever did any work_.

He had his Macbook open. He even occasionally had a book on his desk. But she’d never actually seen it open on any page, so maybe it was all just an illusion: an excuse for him to sit there in his stupid attractive and well put-together ensemble and look wonderfully erudite. While he scrolled on his fucking phone. And chuckled.

 _Chuckled_.

Was there a way to get people banned from the library? ...Was that allowed?

Nyd’s classes had been back in session for four fucking days, and she already had three assignments to show for it. That was just the way that final year went, particularly when she was sprinting to complete her module credits before starting on her dissertation in the summer. So frankly, this stupid man who spent his day in the library doing absolutely _fuck all_ like “fuck all” was a professional photoshoot could take his stupid, untouched Macbook and shove it up his fucking arse.

She was three pages into a dense introductory chapter on Vitus Fabria, his beliefs which had served as the foundations for the Mortalitasi, and his relationship to the Pentaghasts. The prose was so incomprehensible it was like wading through a thesaurus backwards, and she was trying to work out the meaning behind a monster of a sentence.

That was when she heard a vibration rumble across the desk, and stupid, blonde Macbook man took a phone call.

 _A phone call_. In the _library_.

Could he be shot?

“Hello? You have reached Zevran Arainai,” he announced, at a _basically_ normal volume. 

But Nyd refused to hear anymore, as she pointedly began to fish her headphones out of her bag. She plugged them into her own janky laptop, glaring at him the entire time as she settled them onto her head, in a way that she hoped would finally, successfully, convey the unspoken code of library etiquette. Whatever this ‘Zevran Arainai’ was saying was lost, as she cranked up the volume on her music, and stewed in the injustice of foolish, impolite people invading the one spot in the library that was, frankly, perfect.

She was still glaring at him, hoping she had the telepathic powers to imbue him with some kind of conscience, when he looked over in her direction, quirked an eyebrow in an expression so perfect it must be practised, and winked.

Nyd startled. Before she could stop herself, she swung around to look behind her. She assumed that some kind of gorgeous leggy blonde with the same unfair amount of tan - possibly the person he was on the phone to - was stood somewhere among the stacks, approaching them.

But there was nobody behind her.

She spun back around, confused. He was still looking in her direction. 

No - that meant he must be looking at _her_.

And as she had this mortifying realisation, he smiled, grinning broadly like he read the thoughts on her face. His smile was just as beautiful as the rest of him, and he looked fantastically and thoroughly amused at her expense.

Heat rose through Nydhalan’s shoulders, slumped as they were in today’s grotty threadbare sweater, and it manifested as a blush on her unmade-up (Maker, _unwashed_ ) face, as she imagined exactly what he was seeing: three stressed and thoroughly-caffeinated gremlins in a trench coat, plotting his elaborate and messily violent demise for phone-related crimes while boring a hole in his perfect, unlined forehead.

 _Maker, kill me,_ she thought, and hastily broke his stare to bury her face in her textbook. 

But it was just so unfair. She was here first!

Zevran Arainai started holding court, at what had rapidly seemed to become ‘his’ desk.

Friends stopped by with coffee, and they sat and chatted with him, even though there was a perfectly serviceable cafe three floors down which was designed specifically for this purpose. Nydhalan’s spotify library grew by hundreds of songs as she burned through every functional playlist she had, trying to drown out the hum of conversation and the high, lyrical notes of his laughter. It would have been sinfully attractive in any other context, but when one was trying to work through slides for a presentation no one else had done any work on, it was frankly _just fucking annoying_. 

Did he even go here? 

Surely, he wasn’t a student. _He never did any work_.

Nydhalan built herself a fortress out of books in a u-shape around her deskspace as her own work piled up, mostly to stop herself from glancing up at him every ten minutes to see if he was still there - which he _always was_. It had become her new brand of masochistic procrastination: the real-world version of refreshing and doomscrolling twitter. 

She also knew, secretly, that this wall of books kept her and her gremlin ways out of sight from him. And whatever mocking derision being presented with a person who didn’t emerge from their bed perfect every morning likely filled him with.

It was just so _unfair_. Nyd could look nice, when she put in the effort. Yes, she was a little chunky, but she shared a house with Leliana, who knew all the perfect feats of tailoring to accentuate her figure properly, and who had gradually helped her gain confidence around her own body. Her dark hair formed perfect ringlets when she had the time to let it dry before she went to sleep. If she put in contacts, her eyes were the greenest of greens,

But she didn’t _want_ to put in effort. This was the _library_. It was already an effort to be here. _You were supposed to rock up in the socially acceptable equivalent of pyjamas, projecting the fact that you hated the world very openly._

And of course now, if she _did_ put in effort, he’d maybe think that it was for _him_. 

Which it wasn’t. Not in the slightest. 

...It was just she was sick of showing this apparently godlike entity her worst form. It was exactly the same reason why she’d stopped paying for the gym: she hated all the willowy, waiflike girls watching her grow red and sweaty with pitying eyes, and instead now opted to jog along the shore of Calenhad at times when no one was there to see her. 

She didn’t owe these kinds of people anything.

Three weeks into term, and Leliana needed to buckle down on one of her own essays - ‘Depictions of Gender and Sexuality in _Aveline, Chevalier d’Orlais_ ’. So she accepted Nyd’s offer for a study session, even if it meant Lels had to take the neighbouring squeaky chair. It was rare for her to take up an invitation to study, mostly because she said she found the library, with its concrete exterior and admittedly clinical air conditioning, ‘lifeless’. 

As the two of them arrived bright and early (after 11am), Nydhalan swore she could feel Zevran fucking Arainai’s eyes on the two of them. _Haha, pretty boy,_ she thought pettily, eyes straining with the amount of effort she was putting into not bothering to look at him, _even a genlock like me can have hot friends, you’re not special._

And if he fancied her (which he probably did), he hadn’t a stone throw’s chance in the Void. Leliana had wooed Jospehine Montilyet in the theatre department just before Satinalia, with all the extensive bullshit she could chat about Orlesian opera. They were still firmly in the honeymoon stage of their relationship.

Of course, studying with Leliana always entailed its own problems. Leliana was taking a degree in Orlesian literature. But she was also the kind of person who’d already read half the canon by the time she arrived at university, so she didn’t always need to study very hard. She got flawless grades whenever she got the chance to talk about what she was truly passionate about, which seemed to be: religious motifs in the work of Orlais’ bards, and gay people (both of which were pretty prevelant, so her tutors lapped it up). Which meant that, well, ‘study sessions’ with Leliana usually meant sitting in silence next to each other, while her friend chatted just as much as she always did, just over the medium of instant messenger.

But at least they were both quiet. Unlike _some people_.

Nydhalan had a deliberately invited Lels on a light work day, so she didn’t really mind when, three minutes in, a message pinged up in the corner of her browser:

**I see the view’s improved since I was last here.**

Nydhalan glanced over at her friend, who waggled her eyebrows with a mischievous grin, somehow indicating Zevran Arainai’s direction without ever glancing his way. 

Nydhalan rolled her eyes. 

**I told you about him,** she replied, with another unimpressed look. **That’s him. The bane of my fucking existence.**

 **Goodness me! What a terrible fate! Your suffering has been great** ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°

**It has!**

**…**

**He doesn’t do any work!**

**…**

****Ever!!****

**Too busy looking at you, it seems**

_What?_ Nydhalan glanced up - as Leliana, the absolute monster, probably knew she would - and she saw that Zevran Arainai was, indeed, looking at her, in her current ensemble of hasty greasy-haired topknot and sweatpants. And of course, the moment they made eye contact, he grinned in his lazy, knowing way, almost like he was leaning over her shoulder and reading the chatbox alongside her. She still had no idea what colour his eyes were because she hadn’t gotten close enough to tell, but they were brimming with mirth at her expense.

Nyd blushed furiously and pinned her eyes directly back on the screen.

 **Does he ever do up the top buttons of his shirt?** Leliana asked idly, rubbing her nose as she swiped the question on her phone.

 _No,_ Nyd thought bitterly. And the only t-shirts he had - because he wore t-shirts, even in fucking Wintermarch - were v-necks.

 **He has nice clavicles** her friend added.

**Kill me**

**Oh like you haven’t noticed!**

**Ofc I’ve noticed**

**…**

**It’s just that his clavicles don’t fill my every waking moment, know what i mean?**

No, it was just his rudeness that consumed Nyd’s sanity. 

**Does he have a girlfriend? Boyfriend?**

**How tf would I know?**

**You should talk to him.**

**Again. Kill me.**

**He spends just as much time in the library as you.**

**…**

**Clearly soulmates.**

**…**

👀👀👀

😒

“Fuck! Fucking… fuck!” 

Nydhalan cursed in a hiss under her breath. She had an essay on Antivan politics to hand in in two days’ time. But she’d misread the library catalogue order, placed reservations on books in the Foreign Language shelves rather than from Politics, and somehow gotten both her biography on Merchant Prince Ignacio Romero Medina, and the book of poetry she’d ordered - by the poet Prince Ignacio had 100%, absolutely, confirmed fucked - _in fucking Antivan_.

Which she couldn’t fucking read.

But it would take another two days to get another catalogue order delivered, probably, and this essay wasn’t going to write itself. So she miserably traipsed down the two flights of stairs to the Sociology floor, and took her seat, trying to tell herself she wasn’t doomed. Antivan had the same roots as Common, right? So she could probably still find the evidence she was looking for, and look doubly intelligent (or doubly pretentious) for quoting them in their original language.

She got out her litre of coffee - it was black as sin today - deposited it with a thunk onto the table, slammed her headphone jack in, and prepared for battle.

Six hours later, and she’d read the books that weren’t in Antivan, tried and failed to write an introduction, spent an hour puzzling over her Antivan biography for a couple of select quotes that she ran through Google translate to make sure she’d gotten the gist. Morrigan had had to mooch into the building to collect one book from Art History that she’d reserved, so Nyd had demanded her other housemate deliver lunch directly to her desk. It had arrived at 3pm - a slightly sad but politely scentless toasted sandwich, that she mindlessly shoveled down while taking notes on the Antivan Crows.

And now she was wrangling with the poetry book. The sky was dark outside.

She’d found the poem she wanted - the title, at least, was in modern Antivan, which Google translate again could manage. But the actual text was in… and this was where it really started to fucking hurt… _Dragon-aged Antivan_. What the actual fuck? 

There were letters... that just didn’t make sense. Like, little squiggly runes that she thought were meant to stand for ‘S’s. And she just didn’t understand modern Antivan enough to guess what parts she actually needed.

Nyd knew she didn’t really _need_ the poetry. But she _wanted_ it. The most original part of her argument for Ignacio’s downfall was that he’d been too busy screwing the smoking hot poet who he’d been sponsoring as a patron to notice the coup taking place right before his very eyes. It seemed like a pretty obvious argument to Nyd, but apparently it could be groundbreaking for a college-level student. Because all leading historiography on the subject seemed to be written by Very Manly Men who refused to acknowledge the many historical sources of the time that claimed Ignacio had clearly been all types of pansexual, (given that he seemed inclined to fuck anything that moved, and could also write decent poetry.)

Nyd put her head in her hands, wondering if she needed to admit defeat. The essay had to be written tomorrow - was it worth spending these last hours scouring this book of poetry, and eating into the hours of her inevitable all-nighter that could be conducted from the comfort of her bedroom?

She could use a googled line of the poem, and then this book as a cheekily forged footnote citation, maybe?

She sighed, took her head out of her hands, gave herself a little shake, and removed her headphones from her head. She placed the poetry book on top of her completed stack. She was not a masochist.

“He’s a good author,” came a voice, seemingly out of nowhere, making her jump. “I really enjoy his work.”

When Nydhalan looked up, bleary-eyed and in that overworked, overloaded, near-blank headspace, she saw that Zevran Arainai was standing at the end of her desk, in a black tailored shirt that accentuated just how tiny his waist actually was. He looked like a very slim upside-down triangle.

She hadn’t even realised he was in the library today. 

And apparently, he was now talking to her.

As she blinked, brain desperately trying to catch up, he gestured to the book of poetry, raised an eyebrow. “Velasco?” he said, seemingly trying to prompt a response from her, “you are studying him, yes?”

Why was he talking to her?

This close, she could see that his eyes were tawny hazel. His voice was deep and rich, in a way that one couldn’t really appreciate, when one was trying to block it out with the hardiest of revision playlists. And also rollingly accented, in a way that told her -

“Oh, Maker’s fucking balls!” Nydhalan blurted, “you’re Antivan!”

Zevran Arainai looked very surprised and a little perturbed at this outburst. “Um. Yes. From Antiva City, for all my sins. Why? Is that a… problem?”

“No, no, no, you don’t understand! You’re _Antivan_ ,” Nydhalan said breathlessly, tucking flyaway strands of greasy hair behind her ears and hastily reaching for the poetry book again. She shoved her fingers into the pages at the dog eared section she’d been boring a hole into for the last half an hour, opened it, and shoved the poem into his face. “Please tell me: can you fucking read this?!”

Zevran raised an eyebrow, trying to pull his unflustered and flawless demeanor back into place, but then Nyd assaulted him with the book again, getting up and out of her chair in order to do so. And so he was forced to hastily snatch it from her, before she bordered on bodily manhandling him. 

He looked down at the page, face becoming pensive as he tried to read the script. “Um… yes,” he said, after a moment, “...just about. I think.”

“Oh, Maker be fucking praised!” Nydhalan said, raking a hand through her hair, “I felt like I was going fucking _blind_! Can you help me with something? You’d literally be saving my fucking life. I need you to find-”

She didn’t bother giving him a chance to respond, and instead leant over, squinting at her laptop screen, “-the part that says: ‘the symphony I see in thee / it whispers songs to me / songs of hot breath on my neck / songs of nails upon my back’.”

She glanced back at him, impatiently, pushing her glasses up her nose. 

To his credit, rather than accuse her of sexual harassment outright, he instead raised a single eyebrow again, like that was all he knew how to do.

“I’m trying to argue in my essay that Prince Ignacio Medina was really fucking gay,” she said brusquely, by way of an explanation.

“I… see,” he said, with a smirk as his eyes darted back down to the page, “say no more.”

“I’m a historian.”

“I understand completely.”

“Seriously, if you can find it, that would be-”

“-Here.” he said, pointing to a paragraph.

“Where?!”

“Um, give me a second,” Zevran scanned her desk, picked up her pen without her permission, and then began to… _underline a passage of the text_.

“That’s a library book!” Nydhalan protested, scandalised.

“And that’s the passage you’re looking for,” he replied without a single ounce of guilt, handing the book back to her and clicking the pen before depositing it in the dip of the binding.

“...You’re sure?”

“The word ‘song’ is the same in modern Antivan, and it repeats three lines over,” he replied, with a noncommittal shrug.

“Oh, thank fuck! Thank you so much, you have no idea! You absolute life-saver! You just rescued my essay! Maker, bless you!” Nydhalan gave a beaming smile in his general direction, before folding down the page (with a wince, but hey, this man had desecrated it now, anyway). Then, she turned and began to shove her belongings into her bag. Her mind was racing, thinking about the 4,000 words she had ahead of her. That was the last thing piece of research that she needed, now all she had to do was _write_ the bloody thing-

“Do you want to have dinner?” 

Nydhalan froze, halfway through shoving her laptop inelegantly into her satchel. Then, she looked back over at Zevran Arainai, in his flawlessly tailored dark shirt and tight trousers, hair plaited away from his face to show the tattoos on his cheek. And then she down at herself. She was wearing one of Alistair’s old Warden sweatshirts from his first year of volunteering, that came nearly to her knees because of their difference in height (she’d stolen it from his house as payment, after lugging his heavy arse back to his flat after he got hammered on a night out). And a pair of floral-pattern leggings, that she was unfortunately pretty certain had a hole somewhere near the crotch.

“What? Now?” she squeaked. “ _With you?_ ”

He grinned and gave another easy shrug. “It is late, I am hungry, and if I truly am a life-saver, surely I deserve some kind of compensation?”

 _...Had he left his wallet at home?_ What a cheap skate. 

Maybe he spent all his money on too-tight clothes and tanning salons.

“I know a good restaurant,” he said, with an encouraging smile. “You can tell me all about how much Ignacio enjoyed boning down with Velasco, if you like.”

“Um.” she said, mouth dry, “I actually… I have to go… um… write that. The boning down with Velasco. Well the. Um. Essay. I mean. The deadline is tomorrow.”

“Plenty of time to write it tomorrow, then, surely?”

_Of course you would say that, you fucking heathen._

“Not really,” she said in a flat voice. She knew lots of people that could regurgitate 4,000 words in an hour and somehow get top marks, but she’d never actually… _done_ that. And final year didn’t really seem like the time to start experimenting with deadlines.

“Oh, I am sorry,” Zevran told her, and she thought that maybe there was a little bit of apology in his voice, though it was hard to hear over all the charisma. “Perhaps I am too forward? Forgive me. It’s not every day that a woman recites sexy Antivan poetry to me in greeting.”

“Oh please, it wasn’t that sexy. Have you read anything Orlesian?” she said, blushing and wondering how quickly she could leave.

“No. Why?” he grinned. “Do you have any recommendations?”

“No. Um. My housemate would, if you, um, asked her,” Leliana loved a good drunken recitation of half the poems horny nuns of centuries past had written about Andraste. Nydhalan cast a longing glance towards the door to the library. “I… I really do have to go.”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, his demeanor wilting a little. “I seem to have caused offense.”

“I’m just not sure why you want to have dinner with me,” she confessed, honestly. 

“Oh?”

“And I really, _really_ need to go write this essay,” she continued, in a more despairing tone.

“Then… I shall not keep you. I’m very glad I could help you with your predicament.”

“Thank you,” Nyd said. “Seriously, _thank youtorturing_ me! You have no idea how grateful-”

She froze up, as Zevran gave her a funny look. He still looked mostly amused, but also like he was very aware she’d just outright insulted him.

_Oh fuck. Me and my big mouth._

He tilted his head and examined her, “I’ve been ‘torturing’ you?”

“You’re really very... loud,” she said in a rush, unable to help herself, feeling like the very worst kind of person. She even included a hand gesture at his general… everything, which seemed to confuse him further.

“Am I?”

“Is it really necessary to host coffee mornings with all your hot friends, _in_ the library? This is supposed to be one of the quiet floors.”

“...You find my friends attractive?”

 _That_ was what he took away from that sentence? “Oh Andraste’s flaming arse, fucking _kill me_.”

“You know,” he mused aloud. “I’ve imagined the first conversation we would have together quite a few times. But it really did not go like this in my head. At all.”

“I... need to go,” Nydhalan blurted, and then nearly dropped and smashed her laptop in an attempt to escape as quickly as possible. She snatched up her empty thermos, and scuttled away like the gremlin she was.

All the while, Zevran Arainai watched her beat a hasty retreat. Looking like he was trying to work out what the fuck had just happened, and equally fighting a smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! This is a fluffy side project that basically came out of me being possessed by yearning for a pre-Covid time and pre-Covid academia. It's very self-indulgent and in no way resembles canon - that piece of poetry is about as close as it gets! I just wanted to write more of my Zevran/Surana dynamic, and this one-shot spiralled out into something very unexpected.
> 
> Zevran/Nyd feature in my other (more canon-compliant) Origins fic, [A Man's Word Is His Bond](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25589389/chapters/62103361).


	2. Chapter Two

Nydhalan didn’t know why she bought two coffees. 

She didn’t even know if he’d be there.

Nyd didn’t often buy coffees, because she was student poor. The levels of caffeine addiction she was currently enabling within herself meant it was instant for her, unless she wanted to spend a gross amount each week. She hoped Zevran Arainai would understand how much paying for this fancy barista coffee both restored and devastated her soul.

She didn’t even know how he liked his coffee. Maker, this was cursed from the start.

She’d been away from the library for three days - that was her allowance, after a major deadline. But already reading was piling up, and it was two weeks until her thesis proposal had to be finished. 

_Maybe he won’t even be there._

He was, obviously, there. 

Sat in his usual spot, looking at his phone. He was on Instagram - of course he was, the bastard. Wearing a t-shirt like it was the height of summer, and not mid-Guardian. Nydhalan herself was bundled up in a massive, fuck-off scarf - perfectly designed to hide the massive stress pimple on her chin.

She tucked said chin deliberately behind the scarf-line when she deposited the coffee on his desk. It startled him, and he looked up at her, lips parted slightly in surprise, as if not expecting to see her so close.

“That’s my thank you. For the Velasco thing,” she said gruffly, gesturing to the coffee, and then plonking down a little babychino next to it, in case he wanted milk. “- I didn’t really know how you take it, sorry. If you’re from Antiva, anything Fereldan is probably shite, anyway.”

He recovered in record time, running a hand through his long hair and tipping back in his chair to give a wonderfully flattering perspective of the line of his throat. “Coffee… Not dinner?”

“I’m still very confused about why you want dinner,” she told him, very seriously. She had wanted to repay him somehow for his impromptu translation, but hadn’t she insulted him, the moment he offered? He could hardly have been intrigued by that teaser of her sparkling dinner conversation.

With her own coffee in hand, she gave him a nod, then wandered over and plonked herself down in her normal spot. Zevran followed her. She didn’t realise he had - she didn’t expect it - until he sat himself down in the annoying squeaky chair to her left.

“...What are you doing?” Nyd asked, glaring at him suspiciously.

“You bought me coffee,” he said. “...Shouldn’t we have it together?”

“So, when I outright insulted you to your face...” Nydhalan said. “You just didn’t take any of that on board?”

“Actually, Nydhalan,” he replied, voice rolling over her name in a way that made her feel uncomfortable in manifold ways. With his focus directed on her, the levels of hot he could reach were becoming clear, “this is my last ‘coffee morning’, as you term it. I’ve actually gone without one for four days now. But," he smiled, "if it tempts you to break those rules you seem so fond of, I’ll happily partake.”

“I -” there was a lot she could say about the library’s rules, but what she actually needed to focus on was: “how do you know my name?”

“Your friend said it, the other day,” he said. “When she handed you a sandwich. The goth girl. With all the piercings. And the very intimidating stare.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t know why she actually said it. You had your headphones on. I don’t think you even looked away from the screen when you took her food. It was like watching a zookeeper try to feed an incredibly testy bear in its enclosure.”

“Well,” Nyd wondered if she should be offended. But actually, that was probably a incredibly accurate description of what she was like when she was essay crisis-ing. “That’s just a thing that happens sometimes, I suppose. Morrigan lives with me, I promise you she doesn’t mind.”

“I’m sure. She certainly didn’t seem… delicate.”

Nydhalan worried over the speculative tone of his voice, and then settled for scowling at him. “She’s not interested.”

“...I beg your pardon?”

“If you’re talking to me to get her number or something, she’s not interested. Morrigan doesn’t like to date. She’s aro-ace.”

“You think that I am talking to you, because I am interested in your scary friend?” Zevran asked, confused. Then something dawned on his face, something that looked just a little bit delighted: “And you want me to stop… being interested in your scary friend? You’re… jealous?”

Nyd’s scowl deepened. “ _That_ accusation is spoken with all of the ignorance of a hot person. I’m not ‘jealous’. It’s just that sometimes people try using me to get to my pretty friends. It’s happened before, and it’s boring. I have no interest in a repeat performance. So, if that’s what you’re looking for, please -”

“- Ok, so now you think _I’m_ hot? Can I perhaps get that in writing?”

“Oh, fucking spare me. You _know_ you’re hot. No one dresses the way that you do without knowing they’re hot,” she said, impatiently, gesturing at his general demeanour. “Please stop colossally missing the point of everything I say.”

Zevran tilted back in his chair, and chuckled, staring at the ceiling. Nyd wanted to warn him that if he overbalanced, he’d spill his expensive coffee all down his nice tight t-shirt. But that way madness lay. “I’m thinking that might be a little hypocritical, coming from the woman who doesn’t understand why someone has asked her out for dinner.”

“All I did was ask you for four lines of poetry!” she said indignantly. “And yes, I was a little rude, and I’m sorry, but I don’t really think you need a _meal_ as reimbursement-”

His chuckle became a full on snort, as he tried and failed to take a sip of his drink. It was actually quite an undignified sound, and immediately made her like him more than she currently did. “My most sincere apologies, then. What if _I_ paid?”

“...Why would you pay?”

He let out a soft curse in Antivan, accompanied by a wry shake of his head. Whatever joke he’d thought of, it frankly went over Nyd’s head. They drank the rest of their coffees making companionable small talk, in which he asked her far too many questions about Merchant Prince Ignacio. She was so focused on keeping her stress pimple covered, that she completely forgot to ask him what exactly he was supposed to be ‘studying’ in this library.

Nydhalan realised that he still hadn’t actually told her his name. But she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of admitting she already knew it.

It was reading week. Thank fuck for that.

“You are not going to the library during reading week,” Morrigan told her archly, as she juiced whatever green smoothie monstrosity she was trying to pretend was adequate for breakfast today. (And she always wondered why she started eating half packs of cookies before noon). 

“I fucking am,” Nyd argued, her hair a bird’s nest halo around her head that she couldn’t quite bring herself to tame. “It’s called _reading_ week. I need to do reading. It’s final year.”

“ _Some_ of us are spending our final year making our peace with a 2:1,” her friend replied.

“ _Some_ of us don’t make up a bunch of bullshit on the fly about witchcraft as depicted in Dragon Aged paintings and automatically get a 2:1. _That_ is spoken like a true History of Art student.”

“And you’re a _History_ student. One cannot throw stones at glass houses,” Morrigan shot back with an unimpressed raised eyebrow. The expression spoke volumes about the fact that Nyd and her had actually met in their shared first year classes.

Leliana came into the room in her pink vest and pants, having just tumbled out of bed. 

“Nydhalan is going to the _library_ ,” Morrigan announced.

“No!” Lels exclaimed sorrowfully, as Nyd cringed. It seemed one of the few things that united her two housemates was berating _her_ on her lifestyle choices.

“Yes.” she said firmly, adding milk to her cereal and automatically reaching for the coffee she knew Morrigan had kindly brewed for her.

“...Fine,” Leliana said, and Morrigan made a disgusted noise at how immediately she capitulated. “ _But_ ,” she said, raising a single finger in protest, “only if we go out tonight.”

“...You’re kidding.”

“No, I am not.”

“Someone’s got to keep you from being a joyless husk,” added Morrigan - which Nyd thought was actually pretty hilarious, from Morrigan.

“Alistair is on the bar tonight,” Leliana said, with a smile that told Nydhalan she was caught in a trap. “He can get us in for free if we meet him on the door, and he says the band is semi-good. We are making the most of our dwindling midweek clubbing rights, and going dancing.”

“But I’m _tired_.”

Her friend continued to grin beatifically, deceptively innocent, “then, you can skip the library.”

Which meant that when Nydhalan arrived in the library, two hours later than originally planned, she was dressed up to go straight to pre-drinks at the pub after. Her hair had been wrangled into presentable shape, cascading down her back rather than tied back and simply wrestled into a hair tie to make it behave. She had her make-up on and her contact case in her bag, and she wore an emerald green jumpsuit and clonky Doc Martens under a black leather jacket.

She was trying very hard not to think about how glad she was to have an excuse to tart up in front of Zevran Arainai, especially when that excuse had absolutely nothing to do with giving him the opportunity to see her tarted up. 

Still, she could feel a blush of awareness rushing up and through her as she walked up to her usual desk. She wanted to be strong enough to avoid his gaze entirely, but it seemed inevitable when she looked up and caught him watching her very openly. His gaze swept up from the tips of her toes all the way to her dark lipstick and dark hair, and she fucking _felt it_ : the crest of responding heat that coursed through her.

“I’m going out tonight,” she announced, a little too loud, over the four empty rows of desk, not entirely sure why she felt she owed him an explanation.

And not entirely sure why she’d been completely certain he would be in his usual spot during reading week, despite his apparent allergy to work. The rest of the library was practically empty: she had no excuse not to talk to him because there was no one here to disturb.

He gave her the once over again, taking his time, like he knew exactly what it was doing to her. Then he tilted his head, and bowed his head in some kind of acknowledgement, “and it looks like you’re going to have a _lot_ of fun.”

The Campfire, as you could tell from its fucking naff name, was a bit of a dive. But it was the dive that Ali had managed to get a decent bartending job in the summer of first year, and one which didn’t mind or perhaps notice him sneaking them the occasional discounted drink. And so it had quickly become _their_ dive, as Nydhalan slowly collected people around herself, as she was wont to do.

Nydhalan and Alistair were childhood friends, the kind that were inseparable as siblings. Which was what happened when you were both orphaned, both moved to a new town at the same time, got thrown into the same class at school, and then introduced by the teacher in the same breath like you were already a team. The two of you, against the world. Maybe that wouldn’t have been enough to cement the friendship, but then Nyd discovered that Alistair’s brother was a little bit of a shit (she had yet to be informed that most fourteen year old boys were - never mind those who had just lost their father). 

In a rare but characteristic show of stubborn pig-headedness, she had tried to beat down a very well built boy four years older than her. It had not, it had to be said, gone well.

Except Nyd _had_ ended up with Ali as a lifelong friend, so maybe it had gone very well indeed.

By the time they’d left school for their respective universities, their friendship had been so secure that Nyd had told herself she needn’t ever be afraid of them growing apart, no matter how much her anxiety said otherwise. It turned out she really need not have worried. Alistair went away to Denerim to study an Engineering degree where graduates got drafted into military logistics - the exact course Cailan had taken, in fact, with the exact same job after. But he had ended dropping out after the first year. Not because he wasn’t clever enough - he’d actually gotten the same first year grades as Nyd - but because he wasn’t actually sure if he even wanted to do it. His guardian, Eamon, had had many ideas regarding the life he had planned for the two boys he’d adopted. And Ali had begun to wonder whether he agreed with any of them. 

Nyd couldn’t pretend she wasn’t glad that her friend had finally stopped living to the standard his brother had set him like a challenge, and told his slightly overbearing stepfather where to stuff it. Especially when it meant he moved back to Redcliffe within the month. 

When Eamon had cut him off for dropping out and reapplying at the technology college to study Physiotherapy, Ali had started picking up shifts at The Campfire. 

They descended the (alcohol sticky) steps into the bar and took their usual corner table - laid out as it was, with a folded piece of lined paper claiming it was reserved. The bar was still nearly empty. The dancefloor at the back of the room had no one but the band tuning their instruments, setting up their equipment. That meant Alistair was immediately free to amble on over, enveloping Nydhalan in one of their comical hugs where her tiny head barely reached to his sternum. He smelt like he always did - cottony laundry detergent, and sweat cutting through bar grime.

“She sees the light of day!” he announced, as if she hadn’t cooked him breakfast after he jogged to her flat over the weekend.

“We’re literally underground, in the dark,” she pointed out, though she was already smiling. It was impossible not to feel good-natured around Ali, even when one wasn’t already thoroughly wine drunk.

“You’d think that bloody library was the Deep Roads. You go in there and you’re lost for weeks.”

“I have _essays_.”

“Bleh,” her friend said, “words. Hate ‘em. You should use them less. I read one of your essays once, it felt like I was having a stroke.”

“What a testament to your intellect that is,” Morrigan noted.

Nyd sighed. “Not all of us can bodily lift a man, suplex them, and have them thank us for it afterwards.”

“Not all of us are _trying_ very hard.”

“Are you actually going to get us drinks?” Morrigan asked, flicking her overly-long bangs out of her eyes with a disdainful air. “Isn’t that what a bartender is supposed to do?”

“Only if you ask me very, _very_ nicely, you harridan,” Alistair replied, batting his eyelashes, repeating the exact same conversation they'd had every time they'd come here, for nearly three years. In under a minute, they all had their usual on the table in front of them..

Alistair stayed with them as long as he could, perched on the edge of the table and chatting, but with two silver entry the room soon filled in with students, and he had to make his way back behind the bar. As the support act came on, Nydhalan knocked back her first rum and coke, then her second. And by her third, the world was getting lovely and hazy at the edges, feeling very much like a toasty hug. 

“We should _dance_!” Leliana demanded, yelling right in her ear. 

They definitely, definitely should, but - “If we’re going to dance, I need shots!”

“ _Shots!_ ” Lels shouted back mindlessly in agreement, and the two of them tugged Morrigan, who was gradually reaching the stage of drunk where she just got quieter and quieter like a cat stalking her prey (which meant it would only take two more to turn her fucking mental), to the now-packed bar.

Leliana checked her phone, scrolling through her messages as they got gradually shunted forward by the press of the crowd. “Josie’s coming soon!” she informed Nyd gleefully, cheeks flushed and eyes flashing.

“...That’s nice!”

“She’s sooo pretty. She’s Antivan! Her voice is like… like skipping on grass!”

“...It is?!" Nyd agreed, after a beat when she realised that a response was needed. In truth, Josie was so painfully shy (for a theatre person, once it was down to business and she was on stage she was unstoppable) that she’d barely spoken any words to her unless they were both shitfaced. She had completely forgotten she’d had another Antivan she could harangue to help her with that Ignacio paper -

Her stomach hit the bar, and when she looked up…

...Zevran Arainai walked into view. 

_Behind_ the bar.

He was in another ludicrously tight t-shirt. This one was black. His jeans were black as well, and his hair was scraped back in a simple, utilitarian ponytail. He hadn’t looked like that when he left the library, an hour before her. It was the same uniform that Ali always wore, to cover the spills and stains. Ali tended to buy his shirts in the correct size, though.

The two girls stood next to Nydhalan were practically quivering as he slid their drinks over to them with an easy, flirtatious smile, tucking a cloth into the loop of his jeans and taking the brunette’s card from her. He moved over to get the card machine, and that was when he noticed her standing directly in front of him, mouth gaping open.

His eyes narrowed in a slightly baffled frown, but the bastard quickly recovered and then - as she knew he fucking well would - he raised a single eyebrow that said, _I mean, we both can see why_ I’m _here_.

“Oh! Hot library man!” Lels exclaimed next to her, and Nydhalan could only hope the music was loud enough to stop him from overhearing. And that it was dark and horribly warm enough to excuse any blush.

Zevran certainly moved seamlessly as if he hadn’t heard, passing the card back to the other customer, before he then turned to her. “What can I get you?” he yelled at her.

“Three shots! Vodka!”

“Pardon?”

Nyd put up her fingers. “Vodka! Three shots!”

“I still can’t hear you!” he said. There was a flash of white teeth, before he leaned over the countertop on his elbows, ducking his head down to her height. He reached up and, with a smirk, tapped his ear.

_Oh, you smug fucking git_ , Nydhalan thought. But she was drunk enough to take the bait. And so she leant in as well, right up onto the tips of her tiptoes, until she too was bent across the bar, the rim of the countertop digging into her stomach, and they were practically cheek to cheek. Unlike Alistair, he smelt of actual cologne, that held a hint of spice and citrus. She thought she could feel the subtle press of heat radiating off his skin. 

She took a deep, level breath. And then, at full volume, she shrieked deliberately in his ear: “Vodka! Three shots! Doubles! _Please!_ ”

With a slight wince at the noise that made her grin, he reached beneath the bar and got three shot glasses out, before reaching for the vodka. Nydhalan kept her eyes pinned on the bar to avoid awkwardness as he poured. But then she suddenly became engrossed in… well… how nice his forearms were. Very muscly. Very toned. Another of those dark black tattoos was on the soft skin of his inner arm. Even in the low lighting, her eyes could trace the ridges of veins as they trailed over his lovely, slender wrists. The UV caught on a fine lacing of blonde hair sparkling across his skin.

Maker, she was drunk.

Or perhaps not drunk _enough._

He said a number, but she didn’t really hear it. She handed over her card anyway, heart hammering when their fingers brushed and she knew he knew _she_ knew he noticed it. 

But then it didn’t really matter, because there was vodka. She pulled Lels away from her phone and Morrigan away from her boozy brooding. 

“Come on, you bastards!” she yelled at them, shoving the glasses into their hands and sloshing alcohol everywhere as she did. “Once more unto the _fucking_ breach!”

“Yes, Commander!” Leliana said, fully in character, with even a tiny salute.

“You are both _insufferable_ ,” said Morrigan, although there was a telltale note of affection in her voice. And they knocked them back in synchronicity. 

Zevran, with an amused sideways look, wiped away the excess liquor on the counter in time for them to slam them back down.

Three hours passed by, like a watercolour left out in the rain.

“Nyd! Nyd! You need to leave!” Alistair’s voice in her ear, as the lights came up and the bar was once more just a room.

“Noooo, let me stayyyy! My feet hurt!”

“Duncan is checking in on us when we lock up. You have to leave.”

“Let me stay!” Nyd groused, fighting against his hold on both her arms. She paused, going in for the kill. “I’ll buy you chipssss.”

Ali paused, considering, before saying after a beat. “...you go, get chips, and come back in twenty. I’ll let you back in.”

So Nyd returned with cheesy chips, and Ali’s chips, cheese, and gravy monstrosity, tottering from the tips of her toes to her heels while she felt the air chill around her, distantly. The booze jacket warded off the worst. Leliana had gone home with Josie (good for them) and Morrigan had done that thing she sometimes did, where she suddenly disappeared like smoke on a night out and never resurfaced till morning. Either the muse had ‘taken her’ and she was attacking a canvas like it was her worst enemy in her bedroom, or she’d made a bunch of new friends in the smokers’ alley and gone on elsewhere. 

Nyd texted a **you livew?; home daze?** for good measure... but she’d learned to not really worry about Morrigan, who was somehow pretty invincible.

She waited under the awning of the staircase that led back down to the bar, until she heard the lock snick again. “Fuck you, I’m fucking col-” she started, before she realised it wasn’t actually Alistair standing there to let her in. 

Oh. _Right_. In the haze of dancing and drink, she’d almost forgotten. Zevran Arainai was here. For some reason.

“Alistair said to let you in,” he informed her, dryly.

“I bought him chips,” she replied.

“Then, by all means,” he made a small bow, and gestured for her to enter. As she followed him back down the stairs, he said, “your eyes are very green this evening.”

“I know. Contacts.”

"Why don't you wear them all the time? Your eyes are lovely."

Nyd's brain struggled valiantly to keep up with the conversation. "Sticky," she replied, "they hurt after a while."

Zevran glanced back over his shoulder, snorted and shook his head, and murmured, “...good talk.”

“Alistair! Come eat your disgusting food!” Nyd hollered, slurring, as they re-entered the bar. “You’re walking me home! I’ve been _abandoned!_ ”

“Goodness, I wonder why?” Ali shot back.

“Oh come on, you _love_ me,” Nyd said, grumbling. She left Zevran and went to perch on a stool, munching on chips one-handedly while trying to keep her chin in her hand (it somehow kept missing). Meanwhile, Ali wiped down the sides, and kept nudging her when she started to zone out.

At one point, she noticed another flash of gold in her periphery vision. Zevran was moving across the bar floor, a mop and bucket in his hands as he made a beeline for the toilets. “Sucks to be you, mate,” Ali said sympathetically, as he passed by.

Zevran gave a noncommittal shrug, glanced between Alistair and Nyd, near collapsed on the bar, and carried onto the bathroom without a word. Nyd wondered if he was tired after his shift. Because of his stupid superhuman nature, he was too pretty to be able to tell.

“So. What t’fuck is’he doing here?” she asked Ali without preamble, once he was entirely out of sight.

“Who? Zev?” Alistair asked.

“Yeah. You neefffer say he worked here.”

“I’m sorry… How do you know who Zev is?”

“How do _you_ know who ‘Zev’ is?”

“Well. Obviously, Nyd. He works here.”

“ _Why?_ ”

“For the money, presumably.”

“Since when?!”

“Since the start of this year,” Ali said, frowning. “...How do you know him, again?”

“...I don’t really _know_ know him…” Nyd grumbled, fighting her urge to place her cheek down flat on the bar. The Campfire was far too sticky for that kind of behaviour.

“I mean… I know he goes to Redcliffe, but he’s a Master’s student and I think he’s in law… how…” and then Ali froze, wide-eyed, and gasped out loud. “Oh sweet Maker, _YOU’RE ANGRY LIBRARY GIRL!!_ ”

“...Wha?”

“Holy shit!” Ali said. “Y’know, when he talked about her, I kind of thought it might be you just from... from the sheer amount of venom. But then he said she lived in a cave on the _Sociology_ floor. So I thought it must be some other tiny gremlin in oversized hoodies, intent on ending his life. I was deathly scared you might have a secret twin.”

“...That’s what he said about me?” Nyd found it very easy to summon a hefty amount of drunken indignation. “I don’t live in a _cave_. That’s why I go to the sociology floor! It’s the least cave-like part of tha’ fucking library! That’s th’ point!”

“Maker’s breath,” Ali said, clapping his hand over his mouth as his cheeks began burning. “I don’t think I should probably say anything more about what he said about you. I’m now _convinced_ he likes to flirt with death, but maybe even he’s not into it that much.”

“...Why? What did he say?”

Ali was full-on blushing now. “I’m not fucking telling.”

Nyd wondered exactly what colourful insults had been hurled her way. She knew she was a dick at times, but that was just so _unfair_. All she did was want to work in the library, which was what it was _there for_! 

“Did he tell you that he’s the most insufferable person on the face of the planet?” she demanded, smacking a hand on the bar as her drunk voice rose, “he takes phone calls, Ali. _Phone calls_. In the library.”

“Yes. Um, he told me all about your feelings about phone calls, actually. Extensively.”

“Did he also tell you that he’s never done any work in his life, ever?” Nyd continued. 

“I-”

“Unless he has a side-hustle as a social media manager. Which honestly, on-brand, but whatever. He’s certainly not _studying_! He seems to be allergic to fucking reading, so why the fuck he’s in the fucking library is beyond-”

“He’s very clever, actually,” Ali said, off-hand, with a nervous glance in the direction of the bathrooms. “He was a corporate lawyer in Denerim for four years. I imagine that required a decent amount of reading -”

“He was _what_?”

“Um,” Alistair cast another look at the bathroom, then leaned over the bar to hiss, “he worked in corporate law, before he moved here. For the money... I think. But I gather it was kind of shitty, or the people were shitty, or something. So now he’s retraining, like me. He’s doing a Master’s in um… Human Rights…? I think?”

“ _What?_ ”

“Yeah, it seems like a lot of work, honestly. But apparently he used to work like sixty hour weeks, so maybe he’s just used to-”

“ _What?!_ ”

“...Are you ok, Nyd?”

“But he’s - but he’s - _how?_ ”

“How… what?”

“ _He doesn’t do any work!_ ”

“Um, maybe he does...”

“He fucking _doesn’t!!_ ” she shrieked.

“Okayyyy. So, um, maybe he… doesn’t need to?” Ali said, tentatively.

Nydhalan fought the urge to scream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahahaha - you thought this fic was solely a vessel for my yearning for LIBRARIES, you were wrong! It's about my yearning for all aspects of pre-covid life. I just wanna get drunk and go dancing, guys. (:
> 
> Shout out to @kftempletoe for absolutely calling that Alistair's modern university alter-ego would be a physiotherapist. Toll, stronk, helps people.


	3. Chapter Three

Nyd turned up to library the next day, mostly just to prove that she could.

She wasn’t sure exactly what pride was recovered by rocking up at 2pm armed with prescription sunglasses and a litre of coffee, but she liked to pretend that there was some. _Somewhere._ Her hair was a rat’s-nest, her complexion was sallow, and she was wearing her oversized pyjama t-shirt under a jumper that hid a multitude of sins. Zevran was as immaculately presented as ever, which was strange because she remembered him offering to lock up as she and Alistair left, and that was around three in the morning...

More than anything, she wanted to prove to Zevran Arainai that she was very much not trying to impress him, no matter how nice his cologne smelt when in close quarters. _If you can’t handle me at my worse, you don’t deserve me at my best._

Which was a good philosophy to live by, apparently - because ten minutes after she sat down, she suddenly had to leg it past him to the sixth floor bathroom to be sick.

Maybe coming in today had been… a mistake.

After the third round of retching, Nyd dabbed her face with damp toilet paper, examining the dark bags and last remnants of eyeliner under her eyes in despair. If you looked closely enough, you could practically see the vodka being sweated out of her pores. She sloshed water around her mouth, then crawled miserably back to her desk. When she shuffled back past him, trying to avoid eye contact, Zevran made a sympathetic noise low in his throat.

“Why are you even _here?_ ” he asked, incredulously, “why do you do this to yourself? Who hurt you?”

“I have work,” she mumbled, though she didn’t sound very convincing even to her own ears. Once she got back to her desk, it seemed more inviting to rest her cheek against the cool, glossy cover of her textbook, rather than open it. Especially when the room was spinning, under the halogen lights.

_Just for a moment_ , she thought, closing her eyes. She’d just rest them for a moment.

The next time she opened them, her face was stuck to the textbook gloss, and someone was slamming a sports drink and box of painkillers down on the desk directly in her eyeline. Nyd blinked blearily through sleep and grime, to see Zevran leaning over her, a frown marring his brow. 

“You have been snoring for the last half hour,” he informed her, “which I am pretty certain is a colossal breach in the library etiquette you prize so strongly. Please take these, and then I will walk you home.”

Nydhalan opened her mouth to argue, and... found she couldn’t say anything worthwhile. Waiting to see if she could rouse either Morrigan or Leliana from their own hangovers to come get her was a fruitless endeavour, and Ali had class today, over on the other side of town. She sat up, clutching her pounding temple, popped two pills and obediently unscrewed the cap on the sports drink. She chugged half of it down immediately, but when she then tried to move it away from her mouth, Zevran Arainai gave her a very unimpressed glare, and she hastily finished off the other half.

“Those doubles were very much a mistake, I take it?”

She groaned, “please don’t talk about it right now.”

“You seemed like you enjoyed yourself. Heartily.”

“I haven’t been out in a while,” she mumbled. “I usually do better than…” she trailed off, gesturing down at her general state of being.

“Pack up your stuff,” he ordered. “I will walk you home, or wait with you until you get your bus, or your taxi, or whatever it is that gets you back into your bed... where you would already be, if you were in any way a _normal person_. You do not have to work all the time, you know.”

“Oh, believe me, I’m well aware that’s _your_ perspective on the matter.” But as soon as the snippy jibe left her mouth, Nyd felt a bit mean. She didn’t know for certain that that _was_ his view on the matter, not in the slightest. 

It wasn’t that she suddenly had newfound respect for him once she’d realised he was actually studying for some kind of degree. It was just that she was starting to realise how she’d only ever viewed his behaviour from the perspective of how much it infuriated _her_. She actually had no idea about anything about him. Other than the smell of his cologne.

“Please,” he said, gesturing at her stuff. “I’ve _been_ where you are. Take it from someone who knows: the world will not end if you take one single day off from your undergraduate degree.”

“How do you know?” she grumbled childishly, but he just levelled an unimpressed glance at her, and, sensing an imminent defeat, she churlishly began stuffing her belongings in her bag.

“...Do you think you are going to be sick again?”

“Not if I can help it.” She thought she might actually die of mortification if she threw up in front of him.

“You’ve seen where I work,” he pointed out, cheerfully. “Whatever embarrassing thing you do next, I’ve definitely seen worse.”

“Please don’t ask me to imagine worse, or we’re really not going to get any further than this desk.”

He packed up his own belongings, tugged on a leather jacket she’d never seen him actually wear before, and then waited patiently until she dragged her sorry, abused body after him, down the six flights of stairs and out of the building. “Bus, taxi, or walking?” he asked, with a carefree smile. Meanwhile, Nyd shivered as the cold hit her clammy hangover sweat.

Nyd only lived twenty minutes walk away, but she wasn’t sure if she wanted him knowing that. She wasn’t sure why exactly, because it wasn’t like she expected him to do anything dodgy. Maybe she was worried he’d start spying and behold not only her library-gremlin self, but the state of ogre-being she projected when she put the bins out on a morning, as well. 

Zevran seemed to read the thoughts that flitted across her face, and said easily, “I’ll drop you to your neighbourhood. You’re a big girl, and you dragged your sorry arse all the way here, for some reason. I’m sure you can survive the last five minutes of the journey on your own.”

“Um, ok,” Nydhalan said in a small voice, not quite sure how she’d managed to find herself in this position. After a second of hesitation, she set off towards the south of campus, feeling incredibly conscious of the escort walking alongside her. Zevran kept so close, his arm occasionally brushed against hers - though he barely seemed to notice. She risked glancing at him sidelong, and found herself surprised: Zevran was only a head or so taller than her, despite the fact that she wasn’t _not short_. She was used to people towering over her, as Alistair often did.

She didn’t know how long they passed in silence - thirty seconds, or five minutes, she couldn’t tell, because it felt so fucking awkward that it could have been hours, as far as she was concerned. Zevran whistled a little under his breath, and checked her with an impersonal hand on her arm when she had a whoozy second. He didn’t seem particularly inclined to break the quiet. Nyd was tempted to hold out as well, to see who would break first, but... it was getting hard to find motivation to put one foot in front of the other, and she was in desperate need of a distraction.

“Ali said you’re doing some kind of Master’s,” she blurted. “In human rights. Kind of a fucked up name, isn’t it? Considering you’re an elf. Nothing says ‘human privilege’ than studying a degree on civil liberties that hasn’t even been renamed to be inclusive to all civilians.”

“I suppose… You talked about me?” Zevran sounded preoccupied with that, in particular.

“I’ve been going to The Campfire for years,” Nyd explained. “I was surprised to see you there.”

“You’ve been going there, for years? ...Because of Alistair?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Is he your… boyfriend?”

Nydhalan nearly tripped over her own feet, spectacularly. Zevran’s hand shot out quickly, and clamped onto her arm to steady her. She looked up at him, gaping like a fish.

“That,” she said honestly, “is the weirdest question anyone has ever asked me. Ever.”

She and Alistair had existed in tandem for years, as part of a duo. But very few people assumed outright that it was romantic. Even fewer, after seeing them in each other’s company for more than an hour. Nydhalan knew that Eamon had had his fears when Alistair’s best friend turned out to be not only be a girl but a grubby little elf of no importance, but even he had picked up the fact that Ali didn’t fancy her _very_ quickly. He’d probably realised it as soon as he met her, given her appearance. There were very few worlds in which someone like Ali fancied someone like her. Which was completely fine by Nydhalan, because she didn’t fancy Ali either. There was only so many times you could see a boy make an utter arse of himself - both drunk and sober - before you were disabused of any romantic notions, and Alistair had used up all his chances in the first week of their acquaintance. She found him endearing, but not attractive.

“Why is it strange?” Zevran asked, genuinely interested.

“Do I look like the kind of person who could date Alistair?” Nyd asked him, feeling at a loss. Ali’s last girlfriend, Camlynn Tabris, had been a lithe, lethal looking gymnast with red hair. He liked to date jocks, which made a lot of sense, given that he was, for better or worse, also very much a jock. Cam had actually been incredibly nice, with a wickedly brutal sense of humour that didn’t match up with the adorable, innocent snort she made when she laughed, but she was certainly miles different from Nydhalan. For one thing, she’d never seen Cam without make-up on. Cam probably didn’t rock up to the library in her pyjamas. She probably didn’t rock up to the library at all.

“Why, does he prefer men?” Zevran asked, sounding as confused as she felt. 

Nyd could've laughed - like that would be the only stumbling block in the matter! “Um, I-” she genuinely had no idea how to answer. “No. I mean... er... he must have mentioned me. I’m his best friend. He probably called me Nyd?”

“Ned? _You’re_ Ned?”

“Yep! That’s me!” Nydhalan said, immediately relieved to have gotten the conversation to safer ground.

“ _You’re_ the one who tried to beat up his brother when he was a solid two feet taller than you?” Zevran said, as delight began to dawn across his face. “ _You’re_ the girl he took to his high school leavers’ dance, who then ended up shitfaced and trash talking that Anora person or whatever she was called, to her face?”

“...Yes…” _Oh no_. Maybe this wasn’t safer ground after all.

“He likes you, _a lot,_ ” Zevran told her. “Truly, he never stops talking about you. You have a dog, yes?”

“What? Cathaire?” Nyd was surprised that this was the kind of detail that someone would remember about someone else’s best friend. “Yeah. I mean… he’s across town with Wynne, but I have photos of him on my phone.”

“-Can I see?”

“Um… I mean.... _sure?_ ” She tried to fight off the surreal quality to the moment, as she reached into her bag for her phone and flicked on the lock screen, which was a photo of her and Wynne grinning and crouched either side of what could only be described as just... one big chonky _barrel_ of a dog.

“He’s full bred Mabari,” she explained, needlessly. Zevran made a politely curious enough face, and leaned down over her shoulder to look at the image. He got in so close that strands of his white gold hair brushed against her cheek, and Nydhalan startled backwards, feeling very conflicted. There were a lot of issues with his current kindness towards her. 

For one thing, she probably smelt like a skip. 

A skip that someone had poured a _lot_ of vodka into.

“Are you still unwell?” he asked, looking concerned.

“Um….” Nyd decided that the best answer was the one that would quickly get her out of this mortifying ordeal of being known, “yes?”

“Let us carry on, then.”

But thirty seconds later in their quest, the silence was single-handedly killing her again. 

“You never answered my question,” she said. “About your Masters. In Human Rights.”

“Oh,” Zevran hummed, almost like he considered himself boring, in comparison to her and her chonky dog. “Global Migrations and Social Justice, actually.” He flashed her a grin, “it has been renamed to be inclusive, after all.”

“Really?” That sounded… actually very interesting. “Why are you… studying… that?”

He levelled a look at her, and then smiled again when he realised she actually wanted to know the answer and wasn’t just being polite, like he probably had been about Cathaire. 

“You want the full story? Well, I worked as a lawyer for Mac Tir, Cauthrien & Howe, in Denerim,” he explained. “it was a good life, I suppose, exactly as my parents wanted for me - that is, there was lots and lots of money. Enough to buy whatever you wanted. Wine, women, men... whatever you happen to fancy. But-”

“But…” Nyd prompted, almost despite herself. Normally she wouldn't have found a man humble-bragging about how many people he could sleep with particularly compelling.

Zevran's grin widened when he realised he had her hooked, and something eased about his demeanour. It seemed less… performative, and more natural. Still intensely charismatic, but less like it was turned up to eleven. “Ferelden, it has a huge refugee problem.”

“You realise how creepy it is to say that while grinning, right?”

“Sorry, it is just a rare joy of mine to bask in the attention of an intelligent woman,” Zevran immediately responded, like some kind of quick-draw flirt. Nyd fought a blush, unsuccessfully. He adopted a more solemn expression, that lasted about three seconds, but his voice was serious as he continued: 

“Denerim has had an influx of migrants, of late - from the Southern Reach, from Kirkwall, from Par Vollen and Tevinter. We treat them better than Orlais, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be _better_. They disbanded the alienages, but they might as well not have. The disparity in wealth in the capital… it became sickening, for me. And the people in corporate law… well. They are not very nice. The job began to ring hollow. The money, it was useful, but it didn’t sit right with me. There is only so many times one can whore out one's mind, and then not question why you are only helping those who can afford your fee.”

“Oh.”

“I’ve always lacked purpose,” Zevran continued, in what Nyd was now thinking might be classed as a bit of an overshare. “My parents wanted a better life for me than the one they had, so they drove me towards what they knew would make me wealthy. I took that purpose and tried to convince myself it was my own. Now… I want to try and help others. I have signed a contract with an advocacy charity - they are part funding this qualification. Once I am done here, I plan to only provide my skills to those who actually need them.”

“...You work for a charity?”

“What, you think they wouldn’t want me? Look at how charming I am!” he grinned, gesturing at himself, “who _wouldn’t_ want me on their side in a legal battle of wits?”

“So... you’re doing a Law master’s...” Nydhalan said weakly, as the final fortress walls her heart had been relying on began crumbling, “to help people.” 

_And because you decided that being disgustingly wealthy wasn’t enough to make you happy._

“I wanted to study first,” he told her, and this time his voice was _very_ serious. “If I’m going to be defending others and asking them to place their trust in me, I want to get it right.”

“I see,” she said, faintly. 

_She was so totally fucked_.

“It’s… forgive me, but it’s why I find you not a little amusing,” he said. He made it sound like a compliment, even though it shouldn’t have been. “It’s like looking back at myself when I was an undergrad. I was so stressed, _all the time_. I literally tortured myself: to be the best, to get the best job out of school, to make the most money. You know, a girl once spilled her coffee across my notes on Tort Law, and I honestly considered murdering her _right there_ on the spot. That’s why I work above the Law Library, not _in_ it. That place would make me into a monster, all over again.” 

He smiled over at her, “I hope you realise that the world isn’t something you have to fight. It’s not every man for themselves, no matter how much it feels like it is, at the time.”

“Oh? And how old are you, exactly?”

“I know, I know, I am lecturing you like some old man. I’m only twenty-seven, I promise,” he told her. 

“Well, I’m twenty-two. You don’t need to patronise me.”

“Spoken like a green youth!” he grinned, stretching his arms above his head with a sigh. “Ah, I remember twenty-two! So young, so scared! Everything felt like it mattered, all of the time. And _you_ don’t even have an excuse to hate the world so much! You’re writing essays about how kings used to fuck poets senseless while the world burned around them. History is so much more _fun_ than Law.”

“It doesn’t nearly make as much money,” Nyd grumbled. Unlike him, she had near to no job prospects, and that’s partly why she needed to leave this place with a First. It was the only way she’d have some chance to feed herself after this was all over, and to deal with her nice little mountain of debt. 

“Or at least, that’s what I thought. Only apparently, if you’re Alistair’s Ned, so you’re just… like this. All the time. You _like_ fighting the world,” Zevran was beaming at her now, and this time it did feel like a compliment, from the way that warmth blossomed in Nydhalan’s chest in response. 

“Alistair’s too nice,” she said defensively, feeling a little flustered. “He needs someone to fight his corner for him.”

“He is far too nice,” Zevran nodded amiably along, “it’s what I like about him. The people in Denerim were such _wankers_.”

“It’s why they spat him out,” she agreed, scratching a hand through her hair, “he was far too sweet.”

“Goodness! Does that mean I’m ‘sweet’ as well, darling Nydhalan? Denerim spat me out as well.”

“Oh, sweet Maker, you can’t be serious.”

“I can be serious, and often am.” He cast a glance over at her, and then said, “I can offer you a taste, if you’d like?”

It was such a stupid, _stupid_ line, that out of anyone else’s mouth would make her grimace and gag. But this was Zevran Arainai, with his stupid tight t-shirts and stupid spun gold hair and his apparent aspirations to become a _humanitarian_ , so Nyd’s pulse started hammering, and all her blood rushed to her cheeks, somehow stopping just short of her brain.

“I - what - you - I - _what?_ ” Nydhalan said, caught between indignation and disbelief. 

Zevran blinked at her, as her body and mind stuttered to a halt in the middle of the street. At first, he was clearly just finding it novel to have encountered her at a loss for words. Then comprehension dawned, and a wicked grin flitted across his face, like he _knew_ he’d caught her. But... why did he want to catch her? For the novelty of the conquest?

It couldn’t be anything else: after all, she currently smelt like sick.

“ _Nyd?_ ” 

Nydhalan startled at the unexpected, but welcome, voice that joined the conversation, valiantly rescuing her from her own incompetence. The amount of relief she felt, at seeing that Leliana was stood in front of her, by their front door, in yesterday’s clothes and yesterday’s make-up, fresh hickeys on her neck, courtesy of the House of Montilyet, was indescribable. Her keys were out of her bag, and her eyes were wide as they darted from Nyd to Zevran, and then back again. 

It seemed that Nyd had lost track of time, and walked Zevran all the way to her home. She froze up, mortified.

Zevran was, as always, the one to recover first. If he was disappointed to be deprived of the opportunity to tease her further, he didn’t show it. “Well… it seems you have been deposited back into safe hands!” he said easily, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans. 

Both Nyd and Leliana gaped at him.

“I suppose,” he said, with a wink, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Nydhalan nodded wordlessly, unable to speak. As she watched him walk away and found her eyes inevitably drawn to his rather impressive ass, she wondered _how the fuck_ she was going to survive the rest of term.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope people liked this chapter, in which I decided that the modern day AU version of 'reformed assassin' is 'reformed lawyer'. 
> 
> I decided to take Zevran's desire to help destroy the slave ring in the Alienage quest, and run with it. It was a lot of fun coming up with this alternate backstory :')


	4. Chapter Four

_He has to have some flaws,_ Nydhalan thought desperately as, for the seventh morning in a row, she fought the urge to put on mascara to go to the library.

Two weeks ago, Zevran Arainai had had a veritable fuck tonne of flaws, all of which came very readily to mind. Only it seemed that she’d constructed nearly all of them inside her own fucking head. And unfortunately, maybe some people did just fall into the world perfectly formed: hot, intelligent, funny, _and_ charismatic. Like their parents made a deal with a demon, but had excellent hustle and somehow came out the other side as the winning party.

_He has to have something wrong with him,_ she thought vehemently, trying to convince herself that everything was fine. Maybe he was awful in bed, or something.

Oh, and now she was thinking what he’d be like in bed, and that was definitely _not_ a platonic, disinterested train of thought to be having about one’s library neighbour and it absolutely! wasn’t! helping!

It was easy to disdain the hottest person you’d ever met when you thought their appearance was paid for with the detriments in their other qualities. But then you found out that they were also kind, apparently disinterested in material wealth, and all kinds of ‘impossibly good person’, and it all went out of the window. And the hotness. Well.

_It intensified._

Zevran Arainai still tormented every moment of Nydhalan Surana’s library dwelling existence, but it was now for a new range of awful, mortifying reasons.

She rocked up to the library with her litre of coffee. It was a normal day, she told herself. And if she found herself with her hair plaited neatly in a crown around her head, in a cute patterned shirt and dungarees, well. That was because she was doing a group project on the War of the Lions with Cullen Rutherford, and it was common courtesy not to startle one’s classmates with one’s bog-hag form.

Cullen. Now, _there_ was a hot boy who understood the basic, common courtesy of having _some_ flaws to balance out one’s appearance, and give everyone else a fighting chance. He was a horrible, stuttering mess whenever he presented to the class, his hair was very blonde but also more curly and ill-kept than Nydhalan’s, and he looked like he slept even less than she did. He also studied _military history_ , a discipline that was frankly so abhorrent to her that she couldn’t find him attractive even if she tried. Apparently he was doing his dissertation on the Templar Order and its handling of the Kirkwall Massacre. _Absolutely horrifying,_ quite frankly - especially as she’d elected to write hers on the Chantry’s systematic oppression of Mage Rights.

She met Cullen at the entrance to the library, looking thoroughly plain and assuming in his nice burgundy knit jumper. “I want to get this done by the end of today,” she announced brusquely, without preamble. “I did all the reading prep and made notes if you need them, unless you also…”

“I - err - yes - I - well, I did,” he said, after taking ten seconds and a lot of blinking to get there. “Do the reading, I mean. I made notes, too.”

“Wonderful,” Nyd said, clapping her hands together and then letting him trail in behind her and up the sixth floor. “We’ll get this done in no time, then! Thank the Maker! I fucking hate group projects.”

“I… well, I don’t mind them,” Cullen coughed, clearing his throat, “when they’re - err - when they’re with you, I mean.”

Nydhalan nodded sagely, in full understanding. She wasn’t going to be the one to say it out loud, but she and Cullen were the top students in their class on Dragon Age Orlais. Pairing up with anyone else would simply drag their grades down.

By the time she reached the fifth floor, her heart was pounding. It was just the stairs, she thought. There were a lot of stairs.

Cullen had done another group project with her before in first year, so he didn’t question when she led him to the Sociology mezzanine. She strode past Zevran, gave a nod of acknowledgement in his general direction without looking at him directly once - as was only polite - and then claimed her usual spot, scooting the chair out next to her to let Cullen sit down. 

“I had some thoughts,” she told him, in a low, polite murmur: the right pitch for a library conversation, as far as she was concerned. Cullen leaned in toward her to listen, a red flush creeping up the back of his neck as he did so. “Why don’t we focus on rhetorical models of piety between the competing factions? I know lots about how Celene manipulated her image as a woman, and _you_ seem really interested in the religious aspects of the culture-”

“I - yes! I love that!” he gave a fleeting smile, then looked away hastily, the tips of his ears burning, “if… um… that’s what _you_ want to do.”

Nydhalan had already written three pages of notes in google docs on that very topic, along with the page long argument she was going to give him if he tried to pick another topic instead. So it was absolutely, 100% what she wanted to do.

“Well,” she said, and then she scooted a book between them and leaned in, to show him the passage she thought would make a good introductory slide-

An hour later, they had everything pretty hammered out. She _loved_ working with Cullen! Mostly because nine times out of ten he agreed with her ideas, and the tenth time when he quibbled was usually about something she found boring, that he actually knew more about. “This is great!” she said, grinning proudly over at him, “we just need to write it up. I can do the slides tonight! It’s perfect! Thank you!”

Cullen did his startled-deer slow blink, looking a little dazed. “I… um… we could do it now, if you like.”

“Oh my goodness, that would be great! But I’d hate to keep you, if you’ve got somewhere else you need to be. I can do it myself if needs be.”

“I - I don’t mind. I have time.”

“Oh, ok then-” Nyd reached greedily for her laptop.

“Do you want to get coffee?” he blurted. His voice was a little louder than it had been before.

“What?” Nyd said, turning back to him, “now? Oh Maker, I’m sorry, do you need a break? I sometimes get carried away.”

“No, no, I - um - meant- If you wanted -”

“Thank you, that's so sweet! But I always bring my own,” she explained brightly, lifting up her flask to show him. “If you want a leg stretch, there’s a cafe three flights down! The coffee there is passable. I can get everything booted up on my computer for when you come back!”

“I… I…” Nydhalan watched him expectantly as he struggled with his train of thought, knowing how hard social anxiety was to wrestle with. Cullen let out a gust of breath, then looked down, somehow crestfallen, or maybe embarassed by how long it took him to reply, “yes. Yes. I’ll go get a coffee. That’s what I wanted to ask. Do you want anything? Oh no wait, you just said-”

“No thank you,” she said with a gentle smile, “thanks so much for offering, though!”

Cullen got up, and fled from his desk, rather quickly. He actually forgot his wallet, and had to stumble back to pick it up. Nyd didn’t bother looking up or waiting for him to leave as she switched on her laptop. She started opening up the relevant files, when she suddenly felt an itch, like someone might be watching her.

_Oh, no_ , she thought. And she looked up.

Zevran Arainai was _glaring_ at her.

“What?” she mouthed over at him, confused. She and Cullen had kept their conversation at a very low volume, and even then, it wasn’t like _he_ had the right to complain-

“Are you actually evil?” he asked her, at full volume.

“...I beg your pardon?”

“That poor boy has been making puppy dog eyes at you for an hour straight, and you just... ignore him?”

“...What are you talking about? Are you ok?”

“No. No. Absolutely not!” he scraped his chair back and began sauntering over, “there is just no way you are _that_ oblivious-”

“- And there’s no way that you’re _this_ obnoxious -”

“He asks you on a date, and you just ignore him! Believe me, that is very in character for you, but some of us can handle it better than others. You can at least have the decency not to string him along -”

“- What date? What are you talking about? Is there a point to this?” she snapped, “Cullen is my _friend_. Maker, maybe he’s not even that… he’s a bit too…”

“Bland? Bashful? Mushy?”

“ _Conservative_ ,” Nyd finished, glaring. “ Can you please stop being such an arse? This project will be done within the hour, and we’ll be out of your hair-”

“You truly don’t know, do you?” he blinked, and then chuckled, raking a hand through his long hair and he shook his head in disbelief. “How? What does a man have to do to get your attention? Pledge their troth like something from a ballad? Get down on one knee and propose outright?”

“Shockingly enough, Zevran - and I know this might astonish you - but two people of the opposite sex can interact with each other without it being sexy or romantic,” Nydhalan said, and then gestured between them, “just look, we’re doing it right now!”

“Oh, _are_ we?” he asked, in a dangerously low voice, planting his hands on the desk opposite and leaning over to examine her close-up. 

And yes, Nyd supposed, that had been a incredibly stupid thing to say, to Zevran. He probably walked through life sexually charging every encounter he had with every person in the world. Even now, as he leaned in further, she looked at the striking column of his throat, and remembered what Leliana had said at the start of term, about his very notable clavicles.

But it wasn’t like that for Nydhalan. She had spent a lot of her life coaching herself to find herself beautiful, but she rarely felt sexy, or desirable, and she wouldn’t know how to snare a man even if she tried…

“We can’t all look like _you_ , Zevran,” she said, icy and bitter in equal measure. “I realise it must be a wonderfully charmed existence, to have people falling at your feet every day of the week, but some of us are very used to being ignored and we’ve made our peace with that.”

Zevran paused, then frowned. He was so close now that she could count all his eyelashes, and she hated him for doing this to her, for revelling in the power he must know he had. 

And she hated herself, for being weak enough - despite all the logical evidence to the contrary - to hope.

“Maybe the only one ignoring things...” he said calmly, after a pause. His voice was finally pitched low enough to hit library volume, but that meant it also set every single one of her nerves alight. He leaned in closer still, “some very, very obvious things…” 

His gaze flickered, momentarily, down to her lips, “...is you.”

He leaned in further then, until his breath ghosted over her face. Nydhalan blinked up at him, finding herself completely unable to move, as bloodrush pounded in her ears. She fought the urge to wet her lips, even though her mouth was suddenly very dry when she swallowed. His tawny eyes roved over her face, drinking in her every reaction.

“Maybe you’re scared. Who knows what could happen,” he murmured, deep and low in his throat, “if just for a second, you _let go_.”

Nyd, despite herself, sucked in a sharp breath. She felt trapped, but in that way you did before you walked on stage to deliver a speech, or when you were strapped to a zipline and finally jumped: adrenaline and vertigo, mixing to create a dizzy undercurrent of excitement.

She thought his hand reached out towards her, then, but instead all he did was tuck a strand of his own hair back behind his ear, and tilt his head in challenge.

And still he didn’t move forward. 

Because he was testing her. Teasing her. _Mocking_.

She was almost tempted to call his fucking bluff.

“I just had a thought! We could add something to the Gaspard slide, about courtly honour and its associations with what it meant to be a champion of the faith, I read up on it last y…” 

The moment snapped, and Nydhalan span away from Zevran’s (very, very, very close) face, to see Cullen strolling up with his cheap filter coffee in hand. He’d also stopped, looking very confused, as his eyes darted from her, and then to Zevran, basically nose to nose with her, back to her again. 

Then, he blushed, looking miserably awkward, “I’m sorry, am I interrupting…?”

“You are, just a little bit,” Zevran replied, honestly, as Nydhalan said, very loudly, “NO!”

Both Zevran and Cullen looked towards her, one extremely crestfallen, the other openly amused.

_Zevran is just leaving,_ Nydhalan opened her mouth to say. 

But actually... he wouldn’t leave, would he? Because it seemed like his number one hobby was making her feel small, and powerless, and just a little bit unhinged. He didn’t seem to care what he did to her, so long as it got an entertaining reaction. 

So that was his flaw then: _he was needlessly cruel_.

Well, that made things so much fucking easier.

“Something has come up,” she said flatly, scraping her chair back and standing up abruptly. “I actually need to leave. I’m sorry, Cullen, I’ll send you the slides tonight, and you can add to them if you want. That thing about Gaspard sounds really good actually-”

“Is something wrong?” Cullen asked, casting a distrustful glance towards Zevran.

“No, nothing’s wrong,” Nyd told him, vehemently. She cast a glare in Zevran’s direction, and repeated. “Nothing. at. all.”

The next day, Nydhalan didn’t go to the library.

The day after that, Nydhalan went to the fucking library, because _fuck_ Zevran Arainai. Fuck his stupidly pretty face, and his needless amount of charisma, and his awful display of both with the aim of deliberately embarrassing her in front of other people she knew. It was _her_ fucking desk in _her_ fucking library and _he_ would be the one to fucking leave.

When she stormed into the building, riding that indignant wave of rage, she was surprised to find that Zevran wasn’t sat in his usual spot on the sixth floor. For a second she thought she had got her wish, and she tried to fight the little knot of disappointment that accompanied that realisation.

But he hadn’t left. Instead, he was sitting in the chair opposite her own.

When she stomped over, ready to ask him just what the fuck he thought he was doing, he glanced over his shoulder. He smiled when he saw her. The look on his face was enough to stop her tirade before it left her mouth - almost enough to stop her in her tracks - because he was just so openly _relieved_.

“Ah, good,” he said, “you’re back.”

She scooted over to her desk, watching him warily. She was still mad. “...I am.”

“I was out of line, the other day.”

“You _absolutely_ were.”

“I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable.”

“You did.” And he’d made her feel other kinds of things, none of which she’d been ready to experience.

“I-” he hesitated, and that was enough to get Nyd to sit down in her usual chair, because she didn’t think he’d ever hesitated in all the time she’d known him. “I realised that - I see you nearly every day, but we’re not actually _friends_. You don’t actually like me. I think I said those things I said the other day… because I was jealous.”

“ _Jealous?_ ” She couldn’t actually believe it.

“Yes,” he sighed, scratching a hand through his hair and leaving it in artful disarray. “I’m not happy about it either. I was needlessly ugly. I apologise.”

“But... why?”

“I think I - I think I want to be your friend,” he said, haltingly. He sounded almost… vulnerable, usual bravado gone. When he looked directly at her, Nydhalan realised all the kinds of problems that were about to arise from him now being barely two metres distance away. “If that’s… ok?”

Nyd thought of a lot of things she could say. Things like _friends don’t flirt with other friends like they’re trying to find the breaking point_. Or _of course you want to be my friend. Look at you and look at me._ It left a slightly bitter, disappointed taste at the back of her throat. There was also vindication: she’d been right not to trust his behaviour, before. It hadn’t been real.

“Are you actually going to do work, while you sit there?” she asked, gesturing to his new desk.

There was a slight ghost of a smile. “90% of the time, I promise.”

She took a deep breath, wondering if she was some kind of masochist. But it seemed there was no shaking him off, at this point. “Ok, then. Friends. Trial period.”

“A trial period,” he echoed, and as he said it she remembered the sinuous tone with which he’d asked her if she’d like to taste him. It was entirely absent now.

Because the world continued on, as ever. No miracles graced the sixth floor, this day, and Nydhalan Surana was still an ordinarily looking girl with very little to recommend her as a romantic partner.

Being friends with Zevran was a little bit like having the Divine as your confessor, Nyd imagined (or guessed, given that she was not actually religious). So long as you ignored the sheer weight of their presence, and the huge, inevitable feelings of near reverence that shadowed every conversation, they were actually pretty chill.

For one thing, Zev bought her coffee. Nydhalan didn’t like to admit to being predictable, but she imagined that it hadn’t taken much to work out that this was a sure-fire way to win her over. He got it from a coffee shop near his shared house. Once he got her approval - it was, to be honest, some really shit hot coffee - he actually took her thermos home with him on occasion and paid to refill it - the full litre - on a morning. 

In return, sometimes she shared that litre with him, after his own coffee was drained. _Sometimes_. On the days she didn’t have deadlines.

He started sharing dog memes with her, over twitter.

“What is this?” she asked.

“Proof that I am only procrastinating for ten minutes of every hour,” he announced proudly, though she wasn’t entirely sure she believed him.

And they had... actual conversations. Zevran was absurdly knowledgeable, although not in the way that Nyd was, where she could regurgitate books on command. Well, maybe he could, but they were all to do with law, which was actually pretty boring when you didn’t understand what was being said. Instead, he told her the interesting stuff. He’d grown up in Antiva, studied in neighbouring Rivain, then taken his job in Denerim which had also funded extensive travel. Nyd was a girl who’d only had Alistair and her foster mother Wynne for company when she was younger: her life had been very small, and that was the way she liked it. Even so, she couldn’t help but drink in the details of his past, which seemed so very different and exotic in comparison to her own. 

Soon, after exams were over, she, Leliana and Josephine would be travelling around Orlais for the summer and there would be some stories of her own to tell. But still, there was something spellbinding about the way he described his life, even the bits he clearly sanitised for her own benefit.

And it was nice to have so many acres of safe ground to cover, when just looking at him made her heart ache.

“What do you want to do, after this monster of a degree is done?” he asked her, after she’d bitten his head off the day before during a particularly protracted essay crisis and he’d wisely left her to her own devices.

“Fuck you.” Nyd replied. Surely he realised that question was the bane of every final year student’s existence?

Zevran chuckled. “I suppose sleep is first thing on the agenda, no?”

_Only if it’s with you,_ was the awful, unbidden thought that came into her head, that she wished she was confident, pretty, and witty enough to voice. She knew it would make him laugh, if nothing else - the only one it would cause pain to was her.

“But I’m interested,” he continued, “I couldn’t hold out asking any longer. You study like it’s a battlefield and you’re fighting for your life.”

Honestly, Nydhalan had no idea what it was that she wanted so badly, either. She supposed she liked being clever and competent. She liked being the best at something. Morrigan had her art, Leliana had Josephine, Ali had the ability to make everyone he knew love him… and she had this. Control. A direction. A mission.

But why did it matter so much? She couldn’t really say. She knew university wouldn’t last forever, and there would have to be some kind of after.

“I actually... applied for a graduate job in Amaranthine,” she admitted finally, not mentioning that Wynne and Alistair were the only other people who knew that. “In the heritage sector. They want to reconstruct the Keep there, and open it to the public.”

Zevran whistled. “Must be competitive.”

“It is. Lots of postgrad level applicants, never mind undergraduates. But… they have funding set aside,” she said, delicately, “for diversity hires.”

A dark-skinned, elven, and orphaned woman, Nydhalan qualified pretty extensively for that, if nothing else in the job description.

“Well, then that funding is doing its job,” he replied easily, with a slight look of understanding, as a dark-skinned elf himself, “because they’d be lucky to have you.”

“You fancy him,” Leliana said.

_Of course I fucking do_. 

“I can confirm: he is a smoking hot, well-travelled postgrad who wants to do charity work, and I am not a stone statue,” Nyd said patiently, as she slipped off her shoes and collapsed onto the sofa.

“You spend every day with him!” her friend cried. “He _walked you to my building_.”

“I was telling him about Antivan tax law in the Dragon Age,” Nyd explained - weirdly, even though it had been one of the classes she’d dreaded most in the term’s schedule, it had been incredibly interesting once she had him to bounce ideas off of. “We hadn’t finished our conversation.”

“He wants to hear you talk! About Antivan tax law! He must be in love with you!”

“He’s a fucking _lawyer_! From fucking Antiva!”

“I’m telling you, he fancies you as well. He never stops looking at you.”

“I believe that might be the clothes.” Today, she’d been in such a rush to get out of the house that she had genuinely forgotten that her jumper had a massive stain from yesterday’s take out right down the front.

“Oh, fuck off,” Lels grumbled. “It’s you, and you know it. Ask him out.”

“No.”

“Are we talking about that annoying, suave library man again?” Morrigan asked, as she breezed into the room.

“Yes.” 

“No, we’re not,” Nyd said, “because the conversation is over.”

“Why, did something finally happen?” Morrigan asked Leliana.

“I fucking wish,” Lels replied.

“Andraste’s tits! Why not?” Morrigan demanded.

“Because I’m not _you_!”

“Well, clearly,” Morrigan said, “I don’t have these kinds of problems. Quite frankly, they’re exhausting to experience even second-hand. At least Leliana had the decency to fuck Josephine within the night and spare me the angst _and_ the details.”

“What I mean is…” Nyd was frustrated that she didn’t get to say it in a way less blunt than what they would understand, “I don’t look like either of you.”

Leliana made a disgruntled noise as her ‘body-positivity ally defence mode’ triggered, but Nyd held up a hand to silence her. “And don’t start,” she warned, “this isn’t about me needing your support or your validation. I _like_ myself. I think I’m very cool. But I’m also being realistic. None of me knowing what an awesome person I am changes the fact that Zevran is an even more awesome person who could have anyone he wants, and they’re are lots of people who suit him better than me-”

“-They’re are a lot of people who could have him _because they don’t turn down his advances repeatedly_ ,” Morrigan said, digging dirt out from under her nails. “They will certainly get there, in time, if you continue to be this obtuse.”

“...Excuse me?”

“All I’m saying is,” her friend said, in a very unfriendly tone that was characteristic of all her soul-destroying advice, “it’s very easy to be out of the running, if you disqualify yourself.”

Nyd... couldn’t think of anything to say in response.

“You sound like an inspo post on instagram,” Leliana said, into the silence.

“Oh,” Morrigan tutted, not wishing to be exposed as a person who very blatantly had an instagram, “shut up.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Modern AU Cullen is now my new favourite Cullen: all of the awkwardness, none of the problematic backstory. Just a nice boi in a nice jumper.


	5. Chapter Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: sexy times, fade-to-black

Morrigan’s advice stung as it sat with Nyd for a few days, but the reality was that it was final year. She didn’t have time to dwell on it for long. And she didn’t have time to ask people out, even if she managed to scrounge up the courage from somewhere. She didn’t have _time_ , full stop. Deadlines came, term ended, and Nydhalan went home.. Home being… across town, in the little house she and Wynne and Cathaire had shared since she was ten, when the adoption officially came through.

During the spring vacation, she went to Amaranthine for a job interview. When she posted an artful picture of herself from a flattering angle on the grey shore, the sea breeze whipping her hair into a wild frenzy of curls around her head, she tried not to count down the minutes (there were nine of them) until the notification came through that **Zevran Arainai** had liked it. He even sent her a quick message asking how the interview had gone, their first communication in a few days since the last funny video he’d sent her.

 **I didn’t fuck it up I don’t think, but then, I can’t really remember anything in the anxiety haze,** she replied.

Nyd had never travelled alone before, and she’d split her tickets on the way back to save money. She stopped over in the Brecilian Forest for an hour or so, and walked around the tourist centre at the very beginning of the national park. When she saw a book of Dalish myths and legends in the gift shop, she wasn’t really sure what possessed her to buy it. Zev had told her his mother was Dalish, but she didn’t know if he even liked fiction, never mind a slightly weird collection of classic elvhenan works that she personally felt very disconnected from, given that she was pretty certain her family had been alienage or circle stock, through and through.

Then, she spent the last three weeks of the vacation in the flat with Morrigan and Leliana, baking too many cookies and lounging in the park across the road as the sun finally began to reach Ferelden (it had only taken till two months past Wintersend, for winter to you know… end). Her skin darkened in a matter of days, freckles sprouting up across her cheeks and brows. _Haha, pretty boy,_ she thought vindictively. _We can all be tan once we actually come into contact with the sunlight, you know._

On the first day of the final term of her final year, Nyd put some effort into her appearance, before going to the library. She wore a skirt that stopped just below mid-thigh. There was no reason to do it, other than to see what response she got from him. 

But Zevran didn’t actually need to know that. If he asked her why her clothes were fancy, she would simply say she was doing a presentation in the afternoon, and leave an hour early. He didn’t need to know that the only work she had this term was a dissertation, and that this was it: days and days in the library, unbroken, literally destining her for three months of torture.

She was wearing some of Leliana’s perfume.

Nyd also had the book in her bag, still wrapped up in its gift shop tissue. It thumped against her side as she climbed the stairs. She’d dithered over whether or not to actually give it to him: it was a very nice book, perfectly legitimate to place on her own bookshelf - no one had to know it had been intended for anyone but her.

But that rather defeated the point, didn’t it? When she’d seen it, she’d not thought of herself, but of him. Friends could give each other presents.

There was still that awful moment where she nearly convinced herself that Zevran wouldn’t be there. That he’d gotten bored and moved on from her. Yes - that had once been the dream. But Nyd didn’t know what she’d do now if he disappeared without a word, just slipped away as if these interactions never meant anything to him, as if he didn’t think about her every day, like she did him.

He was sat in his - _new_ \- usual spot. When he heard her approach, he looked up, and the answering smile on his face could’ve blinded her. 

“Welcome back,” he said, sounding genuine.

“Ahh yes, you are definitely the one who should be welcoming me back. The patron of the university library, after you’ve defended its principles so strongly all these months,” Nyd joked, as she shuffled round the table and dropped her bags on the floor.

“And you have definitely been outside at some point in the last few weeks,” he replied appreciatively without a beat, taking in her darker, sun-kissed appearance. “What’s it like, to see the sunshine again after all those deadlines?”

“I’m Fereldan born and bred, so you tell me.”

He grinned, and just like that the tension broke. All the last few weeks of catching herself daydreaming about him, chastising herself, wondering if they could even consider each other friends: it all melted away. They fell into companionable silence, and it was like nothing had ever changed. Bad news for the outfit choice, Nyd supposed, but she didn’t actually feel much disappointment. She’d missed Zevran, she realised. The relief at seeing him again was ten times stronger than anything else she felt, in that moment.

That knowledge in mind, she sipped pensively at her coffee, the book she’d bought burning her where it rested against her calf. It was now or never.

“Speaking of going outside,” she said, trying to make her voice neutral, even though it had taken ten minutes, from their initial greeting and conversation to work up the courage. Zevran glanced up, clearly bemused at the reclamation of the segueway, as she rustled around and put the gift-wrapped parcel on the gap between their two desks. “I got you this. When I was away. I thought you might like it.” 

He blinked again, looking very puzzled. She shunted it another two centimetres towards him, and that prompted him to finally pick it up, raising an eyebrow. He paused a moment, examined it, brow furrowed like he’d never been presented with a gift before, before he snicked under the tape with a thumbnail and began to unwrap it.

“It’s not anything big,” she told him hastily, already starting her damage control as all kinds of awful premonitions began to assail her. Nerves churned in her stomach as she told herself, again, _friends can buy friends presents_. “I don’t know why I bought it, really. I just thought - um - I guess I thought it was something that would interest you. It has some nice pictures! And good historiography in the margins! If you’re into that thing. I know that not everyone is. I don’t know why - it’s fine if you just think it’s weird and you’re not really-”

“Nydhalan,” Zevran murmured, looking up from the gift which had, it seemed, been consuming his entire attention. “Breathe.”

Almost reflexively, Nyd gulped down a mouthful of air, falling immediately silent and swallowing down her further self-deprecation. She still fidgeted in her chair as he took the book out, examined it, read the back cover and - yes, she saw it, it didn’t actually surprise her - checked the price. It hadn’t been that cheap, by a student’s standard.

He looked up again. “You bought me a gift.”

“Yep! When I was in the Brecilian Forest. For the day.”

“Why?”

“I dunno. No reason really,” she lied, then shrugged, “it just reminded me of you.”

He swallowed, then said softly, “thank you.”

Nydhalan grinned despite herself, wondering how something simple could also fluster him as well. “No problem!” she smiled, then shifted eagerly forward in her chair, putting her chin in her hands, “do you like it?”

Zev looked up, and snagged her gaze. It was a talent he had, making eye contact deliberate and like it served a purpose. He stared at her, and then gave a small smile, “yes. I am well pleased. You could say I like it, a lot.”

The realisation, overwhelming as it was, crashed over Nydhalan, all at once. It was like a shot right through her heart. It made her feel colossally stupid, really, the fact that it still somehow crept up on her: that it still felt like a _surprise_. It was like watching a horror movie, seeing the monster very obviously in shot, and then yelling at the heroine to fucking see it and fucking run. She’d known she had a crush, of course. But she’d rationalised it, and told herself she hadn't actually invested anything in it. That she didn’t actually know him all that well. That it would pass. That she hadn’t had any hopes, and half these testings of the water were just that - experiments, explorations of her boundaries and her limits and her power. 

That it hadn’t really been. Well. _Real_. Or, at least, realistic.

Until now. 

Friends could give friends presents - but this wasn’t a friends moment. Not here, not for her. And if she stayed... he’d read it all over her face.

“Cool!” she chirped, wondering if her voice sounded fake. She smiled again, tried to make it real - and it was. At least she hadn’t embarrassed herself - at least she knew the right moment to abort mission, and retreat. “I’m so glad! You’ll have to tell me if it’s any good! I nearly put it on my own bookshelf, it was just so pretty.”

“It is beautiful.”

 _Oh, you fucker_ , she thought. Did he know what he was doing? ...Did he call anyone else beautiful? Who was she kidding - he probably went through life saying _beautiful_ like that, complimenting baristas by calling their coffee ‘beautiful’, and making them orgasm on the spot. She couldn’t think that it meant -

“Very few people have given me gifts they actually put any thought into,” he said, tilting his head contemplatively. “It was nearly always to do with the amount of money involved.”

 _No - it’s not - You’re not supposed to realise it means anything!_

Suddenly she was taller, Zevran was looking up at her confused, and Nyd realised she’d stood up in her chair in her haste to escape this shared moment that was about to ruin her life.

Fuck! 

“...I’m going to go get some books!” Nydhalan announced, unnecessarily, to the air, and then mindlessly fled into the stacks.

She walked away blindly, threading through the bookshelves, until she was at the back wall, shelves and shelves between her and Zevran. She closed her eyes, tried to calm her breathing. Her heart was hammering with absolute, unadulterated panic, and between standing up and crossing the distance, her palms had become covered in a layer of nervous sweat. She took a deep breath, and rested her forehead on the wooden spine of one of the bookshelves. 

_He has no idea,_ she told herself, _he liked the book. You just give yourself a moment, and then you can go back, and everything can carry on like normal, exactly as it was bef-_

“...Nydhalan?”

“Andraste’s fucking tits!” she gulped, jumping out of her fucking skin. She span around and saw Zevran standing behind her, leant against the spine of a shelf, watching her, face unreadable.

“Why are you running?” he asked, the friction in his voice running across her skin.

“I needed books!” Nyd said, pressing her back against the bookshelf and hoping she didn’t sound alarmed. “I’m getting books!”

“Nydhalan,” Zevran murmured, in that very same tone. As he took a step forward, the air seemed to shift and change. He scanned the deserted library, pointedly, and then continued, with another step in her direction, “we’re on the Sociology floor.”

 _Fuck!_

“You don’t fucking know what my dissertation is on!” she accused, desperately, and _fuck! Now he knows I’m only doing my dissertation, and now I have no fucking excuse to be dressed like this, and-_

Nyd was too busy trying to think herself out of the trap she’d basically closed in on herself, that it took her brain a couple of seconds to process quite how close Zevran was getting to her.

Which meant by the time she registered it, they were already kissing.

It was truly skillful the way he did it - the _timing_ itself was just impeccable. As she took breath for her next harried protest, he darted in, sealed his mouth over hers, and simply ensured her lips stayed parted. One moment she was talking, the next she was pressed back against the bookshelf, his tongue already working its way into her mouth. And it should’ve been rather disconcerting how quickly it all happened, except of course it was _Zevran Arainai_. And that meant he smelled amazing, his lips were buttery soft, and already his hands were on either side of her face, thumbs making broad strokes up across both cheekbones, manoeuvring her into position as if they’d reached this point as easy as breathing. 

Despite the assertion in his touch, he wasn’t rough or demanding. He was _coaxing_ , like he already knew the exact ways her body would respond - like he’d thought about it, planned a strategy, made a list of priorities by which to lay siege. _Her hair_. As he tilted her face and Nyd met his kiss unthinkingly, he was already working the hair tie out and letting it spill across her shoulders, burying a hand in the thick weight at the nape of her neck in a way that sent shivers down her spine and stars dance behind her eyes - the first indication, to Nyd, that she’d even shut them. _Her tongue_. When she found her tongue tangled with his, already mirroring the exact dance he wanted, he actually chuckled into her mouth, and murmured, “I knew you’d taste like coffee” against her lips.

“No prizes there, genius,” she replied ruefully, somewhat proud she could still have thoughts, and those thoughts could be made into sentences. She’d taken a sip just moments before handing the book over.

And then his other hand left her face and suddenly his fingers trailed across the skin of her leg. Her _bare leg_. They stroked a barely-there line from her knee upwards, before the warmth of his palm came to rest just beneath the hem of her skirt, not yet questing under it. Nyd’s body liquified, and her brain nearly short-circuited. 

“What...?” she said. _Incredulously._

Zevran made an inquisitive, encouraging noise, like personally he felt like she should be beyond words. But actually that hand was like a reset button - power off, and then on again, suddenly into overdrive. His touch was a brand, bringing her back to reality and the absurdity of their current position. She was pretty certain she hadn’t allowed herself to imagine Zevran’s hands on her bare skin, never mind on skin so close to some very important places. _This can’t be real_ , she thought, with conviction.

She opened her eyes, placed a hand on his chest, and pushed. Zevran made another protesting noise, literally into her mouth - and Nyd couldn’t say she didn’t agree with the sentiment. But then she pushed again, and he froze, and then he acquiesced, shifting backward and breaking contact, with a slight, cheeky nibble on her bottom lip as he went.

Him pulling back didn’t exactly help either. His eyes were heavy lidded and dark, still focused directly on her mouth, and already his cheeks were more red than she’d ever seen them, like he too was undone.

“What are you doing?” she hissed.

He blinked, and managed to lift his gaze from her lips momentarily, to give her a single look that communicated exactly how stupid a question that was.

“Ok, I know exactly what you’re doing,” she said. “Fucking _why?_ ”

He frowned, the dazed look leaving his face and consternation taking its place. “You cannot be serious.”

“I think you’re the one who can’t be serious,” Nyd muttered. “I don’t know what has brought this on, but I’m not interested in just being kissed as a joke, or because you feel like it, or you’re just curious -”

Zevran sighed, and his eyes met hers, dark and dancing with light. It was then that she realised he still had a hand planted in her hair - that he’d actually only placed about two centimetres distance between them, and his entire body was still there, radiating heat, caging her in against the stack. They were still very, _very_ close.

“‘What brought this on’?” he whispered, low and soft and sensual, his gaze roving across her face. “I liked your gift. I liked it a lot. I like _you_ a lot. And I’ve wanted to do _‘this’_ ,” his eyes dropped to her mouth again, and they both sucked in a ragged breath like they’d gotten burned, “for _months_. Since I first saw you.”

Nyd tried to take that statement in, but she was pretty sure she’d never looked more shocked in her life.

“That,” she said with certainty, “has to be a lie.”

But the hand she’d used to push him away - the hand still pressed against his solid, lean chest - tightened reflexively against his open shirt collar. She knew Zevran noticed, and the slightest curve of a smile emerged on his kiss-bruised mouth.

“Fine,” he murmured, tilting his head slightly, sweeping his gaze across her face - down across the flush creeping up her neck, down to their bodies and the scant distance between them. And then he stepped in again, pressing her back, so that he could whisper in her ear, “since you glared at me for the first time, then.”

Her hand scrabbled for purchase on his shoulder.

“I knew I would have to have you,” he whispered, breath hot and damp in her ear.

Nydhalan, despite herself, snorted. What a _line_. “Yeah, right.”

Zevran pressed in closer, “you doubt it?”

“My library gremlin glare being a turn-on?” she said, her voice entirely level, “um. _Yes_.”

“Your eyes,” he told her, “are very green.”

“I’m wearing _glasses_.”

“I like your glasses.” he said, and then pressed a small kiss to the skin just below her ear, that made Nydhalan stutter in another harried breath. She swore she could feel him smile against her.

He continued, “and I like your hair. I like the curls. It would be a different shape every day, and let me tell you, I could not predict that shape in the slightest.”

He kissed her neck again, this one long and lingering, with a slight press of tongue. Thank the Maker she’d worn perfume.

“I like the look on your face when you’re concentrating, and the look on your face when you’re angry,” he continued, conversationally. And as his fingers grazed over her thigh in a whisper-soft touch, she realised _he’d never even fucking moved his hand!_ The absolute bastard!

“The look you get when you talk about something you’re passionate about-”

A sound aborted in her throat, then. He said ‘passionate’ the same way he said ‘beautiful’.

“And the way you look at _me_ ,” he murmured. “I like that, very much.”

Nyd had to be blushing. If anything else had made her blush in her life, this little monologue would put it to shame. She was pretty sure her skin was on fire. She felt the brush of his cheek against hers, and his nose grazed against her temple as he pulled back slightly, clearly deciding - and not unfoundedly, given the pound of her heart, the ragged quality of her breathing, and the fact that her arm was now basically slung around his neck - that she was perhaps ready and willing to be kissed again. 

Zevran dipped his head, and Nyd flinched reflexively, chin tucking in, head down.

“Nydhalan,” Zev whispered, her name affectionately frustrated in his mouth, “are you going to let me kiss you, or not?”

She peeked a glance up at him, hesitant. Maker, she wanted to. When she bit into her lip uncertainly, she saw the way his gaze sharpened in on the movement, and her gut tightened. She wasn’t in this alone, that much was certain, but-

“You like me?” she whispered, hating how small her voice sounded.

But rather than give her any judgement, Zevran’s face softened. The hand anchored in her hair moved slightly, and his thumb stroked the side of her face. 

“...Why don’t you let me show you how much I like you?” he murmured.

 _And there,_ Nydhalan thought, _goes the last vestiges of my frankly superhuman restraint._

Something must’ve changed in her face, because the next thing she knew they’d surged towards each other in tandem and their lips were smashed together, kissing messy and open-mouthed. Nyd wasn’t quite sure she could trust the idea that he actually liked her, but she could think of even less reasons to refuse, as Zevran’s skill at convincing her became immediately clear. She wasn’t _stupid_ \- she was certainly going to entertain the momentary delusion, when it offered itself so persuasively. The arm looped around his neck hugged him to her, and then the other hand, which had been dangling loosely by her side reached around his waist and splayed across the small of his back. She let him taste her mouth, and then realised she didn’t want to be _passive_ in this: she wanted to fucking hold her own.

She bit down on his lip.

That was when she realised just how much he might have been holding back, before. The hard line of the bookshelf was suddenly more insistent against her back, as he pressed in until her curves were flush with the smooth, strong planes of his body, and he was -

 _Loud_.

When she raked her nails through the soft fall of his hair, he groaned into her mouth. Her hand slipped under his shirt, and he hummed, soft and encouraging. His breath hitched and he panted as he kissed her, just as unhinged as she was. “Nydhalan,” he murmured low and uneven in her ear, and then he hiked her leg in its short skirt up over his hip and she thought, _absolutely not, no way, not in the library, who the fuck do you think I am…_

Only this was _Zevran Aranai_. And he was clearly some kind of wizard, because as his hand disappeared under her skirt her mind was wiped clean, and somehow she forgot that this was her first time kissing him, this was her first time trusting him, and more importantly: that she was in a fucking library at all.

When her head thunked back against the bookcase, she simply thought, _ow._

And when Zevran said, “Nydhalan, I need you to be quiet, sweetheart,” her only thought was _you absolute fucking hypocrite!_ and then she did something with her hands that made him make a very, very loud noise indeed, out of pure, spiteful, revenge.

“Eh hem,” said a voice, sometime later, when all participants' clothes were still very much on, but some of them might as well not be.

Nyd’s eyes snapped open, as Zevran’s lips moved away from her neck. Her glasses had fallen on the floor by this point: he ducked down and picked them up, placing them on her face as his devilish grin came back into focus. And when the two of them rearranged themselves to look the other way with some semblance of dignity, they saw a librarian watching them both, arms folded. She was not a severe looking librarian, but a young woman in her early thirties, with short cropped black hair and a plain blue dress. It was only her lanyard proclaiming her as such that distinguished her from the other students. 

But her expression was incredibly, _incredibly_ unimpressed.

“We’ve had seven noise complaints from the Law Library, in the last twenty minutes,” she informed the two of them with a flat stare that proclaimed this was not her first rodeo. “They have finals this term. I’m sure you’re very glad to see each other after the holiday, but might we ask for some... consideration? And, dare I say it, discretion?”

And that was how Nydhalan Surana got kicked out of the library, for the first and only time in her university career. 

The next time, they chose a different floor, at a different time (not 10.30 in the morning) - and that meant they didn’t get caught.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 👀👀👀👀👀
> 
> The inherent eroticism of libraries tag is earned.
> 
> I genuinely struggled to try and make this a better scene than the last time Nyd/Zevran boned down in A Man's Word Is His Bond, so I hope people enjoyed it!


End file.
